Thinking about TDD: A Russian Doll, Full of Clockworks

Erik Lundh

Workshop: 90 minutes

Summary

Another take on Inside-Out/Outside-In thinking in test-driven development. Two simple, connected thought patterns, with examples, that helps you avoid serious but all too common mental pitfalls of different takes on test-driven development like TDD, BDD, ATDD. Too often both beginners and seasoned TDD-ers skip all the tests for the hard part of a piece of code. We find that the hard The Russian Doll pattern helps us think in clean onion layers of tests. We learn to look out for and recognize a Clockwork and switch design space to TDD its gears, not just the interface, thus saving a lot of debugging.

Short Bio

Erik Lundh has more than 25 years experience in software development. Erik has worked with mature innovation firms and start-ups, from small to large organizations such as Ericsson and ABB. Erik programmed industrial just-in-time (Lean) systems in the 1980’s, was a “process and management guy” in the 1990’s, and spent the fun part of the 2000’s as an agile evangelist and coach. In 2006 Erik was invited to Ericsson’s first major agile transformation of 2300 R&D people at 10 sites in 5 countries.