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Test Driven Development...

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Recently during the 'first official meeting of the Managed DirectX fanclub' (as Dave called it), Craig mentioned something he's been doing recently called 'Test Driven Development'

It *sounds* like a lot more upfront work, but the process intrigues me.  Anything that can help eliminate bugs, and regressions has got to be a good thing.  I'm curious what other people's experience in this field is.  Craig even mentioned than he found he was even more productive, which was at least somewhat surprising given the extra work involved.

Of course, it makes me wonder.. If I have to write the test before i implement the method and i'm designing a library, i can't even make the test compile until i've defined the method.  It's like a catch-22! =)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 15, 2004
    You mean all 5 members of the fanclub?
  • Anonymous
    February 15, 2004
    There were four of us, actually. Who did we miss? :)

    On the TDD front, this [1] might help, particularly the series "The Craftsman".

    You're totally right about the test not compiling. That's part of the process: write the test to help, drive figuring out what methods you need, then implement the methods so they do nothing. Then ensure that the test fails. Then code just until it works.

    The biggest challenge is figuring out how to deal with code you don't own, like the controls on a form or DirectInput. But there are ways around that, too.

    [1] http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/listArticles?key=topic&topic=Test%20Driven%20Development
  • Anonymous
    February 17, 2004
    Test driven development is absolutely the way to go. If you haven't tried it, go straight to csunit.org and get the plug-in for Visual Studio.

    Once you start automating your unit tests, you will be able to confirm correct operation, and you will build a better design.

    Finally, refactoring is great with this approach. If you change something, re-run your unit tests. If anything breaks, you know what impact your refactor does.

    Highly recommended...
    Russ
  • Anonymous
    February 17, 2004
    "Buy my product"
  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2004
    To whoever said "Buy My Product"...

    1) csunit is free.
    2) I don't have anything to do with csunit.
    3) csunit is an open source project based off of junit (for Java.)

    So, the "buy" is wrong. The "my" is wrong. And, the "product" is wrong...

    Otherwise, your post is dead on.
    Russ
  • Anonymous
    May 14, 2004
    I have been working toward integrating TDD in my everyday development as much as I can, and I have to agree that it has improved my code tremendously. I am now more productive (seems counter-intuitive but it's true), my code is more solid, and my design is several orders of magnitude better.

    There are challenges to using TDD, especially in a position where I am doing a lot of UI work in a team that doesn't believe in it.

    All I can say is, try it for a month. Only then can you have an informed opinion about TDD. As everyone knows, an uninformed opinion is not a significant opinion ;)