Mindful Mischief

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently gave a talk on Test Driven Development at the April NHJUG meeting. A few people have asked me for the slides so here they are. I experimented with recording the talk as well so you can see the results of that experiment as well.

At a high-level, the talk centered around the following topics:

• What is TDD?
• The developer workflow
• In depth, live coding demo of the developer workflow
• Some tips for test implementation, maintenance, and refactoring
• Mocking
• Lots of great interactive discussion from the audience!

The talk was a long one clocking in at over 2 hours so I appreciate everyone who hung in for the duration. There is a bunch of content in the slides that we didn’t talk about so you may find some interesting stuff in there even if you attended the talk.

Slides

Video

NHJUG Talk on Test Driven Development from David Ehringer on Vimeo.

While the talk was over two hours in length, this video captures just the first hour or so. So a bunch of topics as well as some of the great discussion are unfortunately not included in the video but you can see the slides above.

Sections:
0:45 - Background
4:40 - Agenda
6:15 - What is TDD?
8:40 - TDD Workflow
22:25 - TDD Workflow Demo
56:15 - Measuring TDD: Test Coverage, Code Quality, and Other Tools

I recently published a small, open source project that I’ve been messing around with for probably close to two years now but never got around to cleaning up and publishing. It’s called xml-matchers and is a collection of Hamcrest matchers for matching against XML documents. I primarily created it for testing but I’m sure you could find other uses for it. The project is hosted at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/xml-matchers/.

The matchers allow you to do things like:

Source xml = ...
assertThat(xml, hasXPath("/mountains/mountain"));
 
Node xml = ...
assertThat(
       the(xml),
        hasXPath("count(/mountains/mountain)", 
                returningANumber(), 
                greaterThanOrEqualTo(2d)));
 
 
String xml = "<mountains><mountain>K2</mountain></mountains>";
String xmlWithSpaceWrappingText = "<mountains><mountain>\n\tK2\n\t </mountain></mountains>";
assertThat(the(xml), isEquivalentTo(the(xmlWithSpaceWrappingText)));
 
 
Schema schema = w3cXmlSchemaFromClasspath("org/xmlmatchers/validation/example.xsd");
String xml = "<person private=\"true\"><name>Dave</name></person>";
assertThat(the(xml), conformsTo(schema));

Continue reading

It has certainly been a while since I’ve written anything here. Hopefully I have a bit more time to write soon.

In the meantime, I’m doing a talk on TDD at the April NHJUG in April 26th. Find out details of the time and place here. Come check out the talk if you are in the area. If you can’t make it, the NHJUG generally meets every month and has had some great speakers.

In my TDD talk, I’m planning on going into more detail than the other presentation I’ve posted, which had a lot of introductory material geared toward a less technical or more novice crowd. Depending on the audience, the plan of now is to still do a brief overview but will dive more quickly into the workflow of TDD. There will definitely be live coding to demonstrate this. I’ll also go into patterns, design tradeoffs, maintenance, and other topics. I’d also like to touch on how TDD fits into the continuous delivery lifecycle, again with some examples. If you are attending and have anything specific you’d like to discuss or have questions about, let me know and I’ll try to include something.

Being the TDD proponent and enthusiast that I am, I’ve given my share of the requisite “What is TDD?” presentations. I’ve promised to share some of them but have never gotten around to it. So here is one I’ve given two or three times over the past year. I know there are a couple typos so please ignore them. Otherwise, feedback is always welcome!

The presentation is also available on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/dehringer/test-driven-development-5785229.

33,582 comments   |  tags: acceptance testing, integration testing, TDD, Testing, Unit Testing | posted in Test Driven Development