TDD momentum continues

Just a small update this time. The TDD course seemed to go ok and many of the participants now have an understanding of how to actually write the tests first and then move on to the production code.

I got good feedback on the theory of the course, but the practical part was a bit unorganised and some found it difficult to think as proposed in TDD. This was great! It shows that we are truly not used to think this way and hopefully it will inspire to more.

I will refine my course to be even more streamlined when it comes to the practical part and hopefully with other employees we will not have the issue of an unfamiliar IDE.

For the .Net guys out there I came over this CruiseControl.Net demo today. So no excuses for not having continuous integration on your platform either!

I'll be back with a longer post on management issues when faced with delays which is out of your control. (promise!)

Test-Driven Development Momentum

Tomorrow I have, what we in Computas call, a competence-block with the new employees. These blocks contain information that we think that most employees in the company should know something about. Mine is about Test-Driven Development (TDD).

It all started last week when I was reading up on various blogs. Then I read "Learning The Holy Ways of Consulting" from Thomas F Nicholaisen and it spurred the idea of doing a TDD course for my two new project members. I started designing a course much like the one Thomas had and when I started talking about it at work people wanted to have such a course themselves as well.

Even though I have tried to implement this in my project before and not having much success (see: this post), I wanted to try again with the momentum of two new people. What I have now is an even better possibility, to show all new employees TDD and it's benefits. I mean it is extremely important that a company which not only produces code, but also maintains code has to use all quality-increasing tools available. Since we often maintain code for several years after the initial release anything else would be shooting yourself in the foot! For a good post as well as an example of old code renewal through TDD see Anders Norås' blog and his Ending a Legacy post.

Ok, let me get back on the actual subject of this post. The course will be held in two sessions. These two days being Monday and Tuesday from 9 to 11:30. During Monday I will go through some of the theory of Scrum, TDD and show them how to make a sprint log of the items I've made in Jira (thanks for the tip Thomas!). From there on, it's all practical. The task at hand will be the famous bowling assignment from uncle Bob as I'm using much of his ideas on TDD in the theory part of the course.

Lets hope that I will win them over to TDD and by doing this start something wonderful in our company. Maybe this is enough to create a critical mass of people to win over the rest? We will also of course make this competence-block available to all employees when I'm done with this prototype.

I'll tell you more later!