How to fall in love with TDD - Gui Ferreira - NDC London 2024
AI Summary
- Topic: Challenges in learning Test-Driven Development (TDD)
- Speaker’s Intent: To discuss the difficulties in learning TDD and how to overcome them.
- Not a Technical Talk: The talk is story-based, not code-driven.
- Speaker’s Background: The speaker, named G, is not promoting any product or service.
- Challenges in Learning TDD:
- Angry Discussions: Encountering heated debates online about TDD.
- TDD Advocates: Some developers aggressively promote TDD.
- TDD Skeptics: Others see TDD as a waste of time, including managers and those with negative past experiences.
- Speaker’s TDD Journey:
- Initial Struggles: Faced unrealistic deadlines and after-hours issues.
- Discovery of TDD: Inspired by Kent Beck’s book, faced challenges without a mentor.
- Transformation: TDD was transformative, creating a framework for improvement.
- Gartner Hype Cycle: Relates TDD adoption to the cycle of initial excitement, facing challenges, quitting, or overcoming and finding value.
- Learning TDD:
- Red-Green-Refactoring: The basic TDD cycle.
- Test List: A thinking phase to offload ideas and plan tests.
- Writing Failing Tests: Importance of seeing tests fail to ensure correctness.
- Taking Tests to Green: Avoid over-designing; make the simplest changes to pass tests.
- Refactoring: Improve code quality without adding new tests.
- Architecting for Testing:
- Clean Architecture: Designing for testability.
- Testing Pyramid: Mapping architecture to unit, integration, and application tests.
- TDD Limitations: Not suitable for all types of testing, such as UI or acceptance tests.
- Test Coverage: Coverage is a signal, not a goal; mutation testing can provide better insights.
- Behavior Over Implementation: Test behaviors through public contracts, not implementation details.
- TDD as a Flywheel: Initially hard, but gains momentum and becomes easier.
- Empathy and Change: The speaker learned from teaching his dog and encourages empathy in teaching others about TDD.
Conclusion: The speaker encourages perseverance in learning TDD, sharing personal experiences and insights on how to effectively integrate TDD into one’s development process, while also emphasizing the importance of empathy and understanding towards others’ perspectives on TDD.