TDD

Geekery Pro-Tip: I frequently remind myself: Think Less, Sense More. It’s advice I give to me all over the place, from the most technical parts of the sociotechnical fractal to the most social parts of it. It’s an odd thing to say, so we better dig in to it a little. I’ve recently come from a conference. This was a good one for me, full of old friends and new, smart crazy passionate people coming together to figure out what

TDD Pro-Tip: Before I write the first test in a new context, I usually design until I get to a state of "Nervous Optimism". A couple of days ago, I was party to some drinking geekery with my colleagues at a hookah bar restaurant dance club. It was the end of a long day, and we were unwinding and being pretty silly. My three partners in crime mobbed on "Evil Hangman", a fun little game. And I sat off to

TDD Pro-Tip: I stay very aware of my testing context’s data, and specifically of what data is opaque and what data is transparent. Those terms, transparent and opaque, need a little explanation. Sometimes the code I’m testing doesn’t vary based on the entirety of its input. A trivial example, the function that validates the date of an order DOES NOT CARE what any other field in that order is or does. It only cares about the date field. I would

TDD Pro-Tip: What we TDD most rigorously and faithfully is our branching logic. This is the insight one needs to start gaining TDD’s massive productivity benefit. All three terms are important, "our", "branching", and "logic", so let’s take them one at a time. Remember as we forge in to this: there is no free lunch, but if there were a free lunch, writing a test ain’t it. Every test we write costs something and benefits something. We need that benefit

TDD Pro-Tip: Wrap framework collection classes early and often. The Primitive Obsession smell is ubiquitous around collections, and not seeing and fixing it can greatly hamper productivity. In HollywoodSimulator, a common act of every Person is to spend time manipulating their little black book — the collection of the contacts they have. The first-pass way to represent this would be to use a framework collection class. In Java/Kotlin, that’s List<Person>. List<Person> is not a primitive, far from it, in Java

TDD Pro-Tip: Because the power of TDD is operational rather than artifactual, test-before provides several benefits over test-after. Sometimes folks propose the writing of tests after the code is written. The idea here is that the point of the game is to have the tests, and that it makes no difference whether we do them before we write the code or after. This idea is flawed: it centers TDD around the artifact — the made test — rather than the