Steve Freeman

Brian’s been paying us the compliment of taking our book seriously and working through our extended example, translating it to Ruby.

He has a point of contention in that he’s doubtful about the value of our end-to-end tests. To be more precise, he’s doubtful about the value of our automated end-to-end tests, a view shared [...]

Prove you’re not superstitious! I’ll be giving my talk on Sustainable TDD at Skills Matter on Friday, 13th November. Sign up here (if you dare).

This talk is about the qualities we look for in test code that keep the development “habitable.” We want to make sure the tests pull their weight by making them [...]

I’m running a track at QCon in San Francisco on Friday 20th November. The topic is Technical Skills for Agile Development, and it’s about some of the technical essentials that Agile teams need to keep moving.

I’ll be presenting a session, based on material from our book, on how to live with your tests over [...]

This “Darwinian” post that TDD Is Not For the Weak says that not everyone can cope with TDD, it’s for “the Alpha, the strong, the experienced”. I don’t want to believe this, because I think that developers who can’t cope with any level of TDD shouldn’t be coding at all, so I won’t.

This claim [...]

This popped up on a technical discussion site recently. The original question was how to write tests for code that invokes a method on particular values in a list. The problem was that the tests were messy, and the author was looking for a cleaner alternative. Here’s the example test, it asserts that the even-positioned [...]

I’ve come across what might be a synchronisation bug while working on the book.

The end-to-end tests for our example application use the WindowLicker framework to drive the Swing user interface. Our test infrastructure starts the application up in another thread (it’s as close as we can get to running from the command line), then [...]

At the recent Software Craftsmanship conference in London, Willem and Marc ran a session on Responsibility-Driven Development with Mocks for about 30 people. Nat Pryce and I were sitting at the back watching and occasionally heckling.

The first striking thing was that when Willem and Marc asked who was using “Mock Objects” most everyone put [...]

Cay Horstmann, Professor of CS at San Jose State University, Sun Java Champion, and consultant in Internet Programming, says
I perform an occasional unit test after I’ve encountered a failure that I don’t want to have recur, but I rarely write the tests first. If so many experienced developers don’t write unit tests, what does that [...]

Just found this useful guide

Anyone new to [TDD] should begin with a partner who is more experienced, not only because it is safer but also because one can learn from the other’s experience.

Before starting the [TDD], it is important to have a general picture of the route and how it should be [TDD]‘d. If the [...]

This paper1 from Microsoft’s Empirical Software Measurement group reports that

Case studies were conducted with three development teams at Microsoft and one at IBM that have adopted TDD. The results of the case studies indicate that the pre-release defect density of the four products decreased between 40% and 90% relative to similar projects that did not [...]