Test Driven Development: By Example Author: Kent Beck | Language: English | ISBN:
0321146530 | Format: PDF
Test Driven Development: By Example Description
Quite simply, test-driven development is meant to eliminate fear in application development. While some fear is healthy (often viewed as a conscience that tells programmers to "be careful!"), the author believes that byproducts of fear include tentative, grumpy, and uncommunicative programmers who are unable to absorb constructive criticism. When programming teams buy into TDD, they immediately see positive results. They eliminate the fear involved in their jobs, and are better equipped to tackle the difficult challenges that face them. TDD eliminates tentative traits, it teaches programmers to communicate, and it encourages team members to seek out criticism However, even the author admits that grumpiness must be worked out individually! In short, the premise behind TDD is that code should be continually tested and refactored. Kent Beck teaches programmers by example, so they can painlessly and dramatically increase the quality of their work.
- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (November 18, 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0321146530
- ISBN-13: 978-0321146533
- Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.6 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
This Kent Beck title is an introduction to the world of Test-Driven Development (TDD). The book teaches the concepts of TDD by working through two complete sample projects. Along the way, Beck gives the reader valuable insight into the thought process and techniques behind successful test-driven development. When the reader has finished working through these sample projects, he should know enough about TDD to get started working on a TDD project.
The book is divided into three sections. The first two sections are each walkthroughs of the aforementioned sample projects using TDD. The third section is a collection of notes and useful tips to try to get the most out of TDD. If you've ever read anything from Beck, then you should be familiar with his style. If you haven't, Beck is an engaging enough writer, and the text flows smoothly and is fairly pleasant to read.
It would help to be familiar with some member of the xUnit family prior to reading this book. Beck uses Java and JUnit for the first section, but never really goes into discussing the JUnit API. Readers unfamiliar with xUnit may have no idea how to proceed with writing their own tests using one of these frameworks. True the API is simple enough that its functions may be ascertained simply by reading the code, but this is no reason not to provide explanation. The second sample project is an actual implementation of xUnit, so a bit more information may be gleaned here. Beck made the curious decision to use Python as the language of implementation for the second project, although he does provide explanation of the language's fundamentals. Finally, none of the sample projects are really complicated enough to do more than get us going on the path of TDD.
Many other reviewers have, with some justification, bemoaned the crunchingly slow pace of this book. Yes, the book moves through its examples slowly. Yes, sometimes Beck's mock humility comes off more than a little snide. It's not perfect on those counts, but please keep in mind that this is a book about a _process_, not a _result_.
The first example takes up almost half the book just to go through a pretty minimal implementation of a multi-currency representation for money. If this were a book about how to implement money representations, it would be a dismal failure. But of course, that's not the point at all -- the point is to use an example that's simple (so as not to be distracting), but just complex enough to produce adequate talking points to drive a discussion about test-driven development (TDD).
TDD is incredibly important, surprisingly late in arriving as a TLA unto itself, and Beck certainly gets points (cf. the review about "90% is just showing up") for producing a good straightforward introduction that's sorely needed. Nobody's going to come away from this book feeling filled to the brim with facts and sophisticated techniques. It's a short book (around 200 pages), and its pace is unhurried. What it does is focus on _fundamentals_.
TDD is all about buyin -- once you "get religion" and become "test-infected" (per Gamma), you've got a solid basis to grow from. It's about habits, and habits can be hard to teach. What's obvious to one person is mysterious to the next. Beck's approach of "sit here with me and listen to my thoughts on a simple, representative problem" is perfectly adequate. It concedes (repeatedly) that some of the steps are obvious, but the pages quickly and one never feels truly bogged down.
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