September 2014 – On Responsive Development

I’m an avid TDD’er. I just love it. I teach it a lot. To those who think they know and to beginners. And it is not so easy to grook. And maybe it’s an acquired taste. I feel it is an essential tool in a programmers tricks, and am amazed that so few actually know it well enough. And that there are still those that actively denounce it. It is not universally applicable, true, but in my mind, if you consider yourself a programmer, you must know how to do it fluently. Period.

In a few installments I plan on showing the way I do it. And possibly allow a few others to acquire the taste, and some proficiency. Maybe even some more seasoned coders out there will pick up some tricks. Or teach me some…

For me TDD is very much about three words: focus, confidence and pace.

TDD done right allows, and forces, you to focus. We all know that focus is key to progress. But also that you usually only manage to focus on smaller, clear, things. Big, fuzzy things are hard to pinpoint, to focus on and of course, to get any progress on. So the first step to TDD is partitioning into smaller chunks.

Let’s get started. You have probably read, or heard, that the first thing that you should do is write a test.

Wrong.

Continue reading “TDD Series Part 1 – First write a test? Not.”

I’ve ben involved with the development of Cgreen for a few years, so when Software Craftsmanship Linköping asked me to do a TDD session for them I obviously choose that as my basis.

Cgreen is nice for allowing modern TDDing in C (and C++) using fluent API, mocks and the rest.

I talked and we coded. I selected the Texas Hold’em kata, which is interesting because of the multitude of dimensions that need to be covered. It is also a good kata to retry to experiment with different order of the tests. (Actually, I did it from memory and got it wrong, players have 2 private cards and community cards are delt until player folds. So the tests below are inaccurate.) Continue reading “Texas Hold’em with Cgreen”