Test-Driven Development by Example

PinglePongle writes "Kent Beck is well known as one of the main drivers behind eXtreme Programming -- a style of development which favours a very disciplined but low-formality approach to coding. Writing applications 'test-first' is one of the practices of XP, and this book explores the subject of test-driven development in detail." Read on for the complete review. Test-Driven Development by Example author Kent Beck pages 220 publisher Addison Wesley rating Superb reviewer PinglePongle ISBN 0321146530 summary Kent Beck -- author of the original Extreme Programming book -- explains in detail how to turn your development world upside down by starting with the test, then writing the code.

What it's all about: Test-driven development is about being able to take tiny little steps forward, test that the step took you in the right direction, and repeat. The "TDD Mantra" is red/green/refactor:

• Red: write a test which will exercise a feature, but which will fail (because you haven't yet written the code)
• Green: make the test succeed, doing whatever you need to do to get to "green" as quickly as possible -- don't worry about prettiness
• Refactor: now that you have code which passes the test, eliminate all the duplication

The book then shows 2 fairly detailed examples of a development project (or snippet of a project) which progress using this style of coding. The first example deals with the creation of multi-currency capabilities for an existing project. In the space of 17 chapters, the author walks you through the creation of 6 classes (1 test class, 5 functional classes), complete with the thought-processes behind them. The code is written in java, and is trivially easy to follow, because it gets introduced in tiny little chunks; most chapters are less than 6 pages in length.

The second example is the creation of a unit testing framework in Python. It is significantly more complex and real-world than the first example, but again proceeds in very small steps, and in small chapters.

The final part of the book contains patterns for test-driven development -- practical real-world advice on how to do this stuff for real. Nearly all the "patterns" are phrased as question/answer pairs, and they range from deeply technical design patterns to advice on the best way to arrange the furniture.

What's good about the book? Kent Beck is a very good writer -- his writing is clear, he is not afraid to leave out stuff he assumes you can guess for yourself, but when he does go into detail you feel it is necessary to get the big picture, rather than mere geek bravado. Even if you don't adopt Test-Driven Development, many of the ideas are well worth considering for your day-to-day coding situations.

What could have been better? The book stresses the importance of taking 'little steps,' and sometimes you feel impatient to move to more challenging tests before properly finishing the current chapter. I was also hoping for more of a discussion on the practicalities of unit testing database-driven systems, where you frequently have to test business entities which are closely coupled to the database.

Summary If you code for a living, or manage people who do, you should read this book -- it's a quick enough read -- and consider some of the assertions it makes. If you feel you're introducing more bugs than you expected, if you feel uneasy about how close your work matches the requirements, this book gives you some powerful ideas. You can purchase Test-Driven Development by Example from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Is XP good?

[timeOday]

Now that XP has been "out there" for a while, does anybody have some war stories?

Does the reliance on incremental development and refactoring rather than a intricate, up-front design really work, or result in a big wad of band-aids?

Is pair programming OK, or do you sometimes get stuck with the nitpicker from hell who has to have every detail his own way?

Is close involvement with the customer good, or does it just give them daily opportunities for endless bright ideas that prevent convergence?

Just wondering...

Re:Is XP good?

[dubl-u]

Hi! I've been doing XP on and off (depending on client preferences) for a couple of years.

I'm immensely happy with it. It's not a magic bullet, but gives me the tools to solve a lot of common problems.

Does the reliance on incremental development and refactoring rather than a intricate, up-front design really work, or result in a big wad of band-aids?

Yes, it works. It takes a bit to learn how to do it well, but it works.

Indeed, in some ways, it works better. When I did most of my designing up front, I had to guess about a lot of things. Now I'm a pretty good guesser, but I'm not perfect. And since I knew I was making designs that I had to live with for years, I tended to play it safe, putting in things that I would probably need someday. I hoped.

Now, I don't put anything in until I know I need it. This keeps the design cleaner, and saves me all of the time I would have spent on bad guesses and things obsoleted by changing requirements.

Is pair programming OK, or do you sometimes get stuck with the nitpicker from hell who has to have every detail his own way?

I like pair programming a lot, and more people are good at it than you would expect. But some people are indeed pains in the ass; just last week we had to sit one guy down and have The Talk with him. If he doesn't shape up, he can go be a nitpicking cowboy on somebody else's project.

Right now I'm also doing some solo work, and it really suffers from the lack of a pair.

Is close involvement with the customer good, or does it just give them daily opportunities for endless bright ideas that prevent convergence?

It can work really, really well. The trick is that you must let them steer the project, so that they can see that asking for all sorts of random stuff means that their precious project will be screwed.

For example, I and another fellow were recently called in to work on a project that was six weeks from delivery and running late. The product manager handed us a one-page spec, spent 30 minutes showing us the existing code and said, "So can you do that in time?"

Now the only honest answer was, "I dunno, but probably not with all that you've asked for." But we walked him through the XP practice known as the Planning Game, where we broke his requirements down into bite-size chunks, wrote them on index cards, and then he ordered them by importance. There was far more work than could be done in time.

So then we asked him to draw a line at the point which, if we didn't reach it, he would slip the date, and if we did, he would ship. It cause him great pain, but he did it. Then we agreed that we would start developing and see how things were progressing.

As time went on, he, like any client, had all sorts of great ideas, and so did we. Every one got written on a card, and we asked him to place them wherever he wanted in the stack. This forced him to make tradeoffs; the more stuff he put in before the release, the farther away the release would be.

When the six weeks were up, we shipped a product with less than half of what he originally asked for. But instead of being pissed, he was happy! He got the half that was most important to him, and he was the one who made every choice about scope, so it wasn't our fault, that was just how things were.

And best of all, because we'd stuck to the XP practices and done extensive testing, there have been no bugs reported against our code. With code that solid, we're glad to start extending it, instead of the usual pattern where a big deadline push means the code is crap.

So yes, I like XP a lot. I get to write good code, polish the design, and have good relationships with the business folk. It rocks!

Re:sounds great but...

[October_30th]

You're going to have to work with other people. The better you work with them, the better you work, the better everyone works. (Hugs not required.)

I couldn't agree more.

I can't think of many jobs - at least for college/university educated people - that do not require soft skills like ability to work with your coworkers and communication (meetings, presentations, acting as a tour guide for VIPs, etc.).

I used to hate having to deal with other people any any way. In fact, that was one of the reasons why I decided to embark on a research scientists (Physics) career. As a scientist I wouldn't have to deal with people, give talks, socialize or - most imporant of all - end up in any kind of a manager/boss line of work. I would just sit, think and write papers. That's what I thought and boy how wrong I was.

Most science, and experimental physics in particular, is done in groups. There's no way around it. You can't run a lab alone so you need to have people around you. Even as a postdoc you have to be able to hire good PhD candidates and supervise them. You have to be able to interview them, understand what makes each of them tick at workplace and how to manage them to get the best out of them.

Then, unless your lab is established and extremely well funded, staffed and equipped, you often need collaboration from other groups. Making contacts with other scientists and establishing mutually beneficial collaboration requires publicity (talks!), diplomacy (socializing!) and patience.

A person who cannot work with other people simply does not fit into this environment. No matter how brilliant scientist he is, without the social skills he is very likely to turn out as nothing.

I still get slightly nervous when I have to a give a talk. I still don't like meetings. However, I have grown fond of managing people, because, as difficult as it sometimes can be, it's a wonderful feeling to see your highly motivated and skilled people working with you in harmony. The older I get the more I appreciate social skills over raw intelligence or mathematical/logical ability. If it all comes in one package, jolly good. However, if I had to choose between a budding physics genius with a highly abrasive personality and a slightly well performing person with good social skills, I'd choose the latter. No question about it.