Slashdot Mirror
Test Driven Development Examples?
esnyder queries: "I find the pragmatic/agile/XP hype about test driven development compelling, but find it hard to see how to test first (or even unit test at all) in some situations. I would like to explore some extended examples of it in a moderate to large scale real world codebase to improve my test design skills. Can anyone recommend some F/OSS software projects that consistently use test driven development processes that I could check out? Preferable over 50K lines of code, but I'd welcome pointers to anything that people think would be helpful."
Where I work we're coding a dating site. Currently, it's up to about 180K lines of scripts written in PHP. However, not a lot of it was written with unit testing (and test-driven development) in mind. I'm a big believer in unit testing but it's been hard to get the other members on board as they complain how hard it is to write unit tests for web pages. Bah.
So, most of the library functions that I wrote (stuff like except an integer, return a text string from a list) have been unit tested by myself, and every time I change a function or a class, I try and write a unit test for it.
Seriously, you just need to dive right in and think about how you make your code easy to test. I use the SimpleTest testing framework (it's PHP), and I always feel good when my array of tests all run correctly when I make a major change to the code that impacts a huge portion of the site.
If test-driven development has done one thing, it's forced me to carefully examine my code to create a way to make sure it is actually working according to the business logic we've been asked to implement.
The first wow, that's cool moment I had with test driven development was from an article on Object Mentor called The Bowling Game. It also highlights pair programming a bit.
The unique thing about the article was that it was presented as a discussion between two developers pair programming doing agile test driven development of the game. It was like watching over their shoulders.
If you want to get an idea of what extreme programming is like, I suggest reading this article AND writing the code and tests along with it, either in Java (and JUnit) or C#/VB.NET (and NUnit) or another language with a xUnit unit testing framework. Most object oriented languages have them now so you don't have to roll your own framework.
----- rL
Is it the reason it took forever to develop it? 3X was promised last summer, but it's still in its "early stage". E17 is being developed faster.
Less is more !