Spreading the TDD Virus Is Hard
automated builds, software development, test driven development
“Oh, if we’re going to hook the project up to cruisecontrol I better write some tests.” –An Unnamed Developer
I’m not sure the fact that I spent a day doing a class on TDD last week has completely sunk in. Tomorrow I hook up cruisecontrol and maybe do some pairing so we can make some progress on this front. Maybe it’s time to invoke harsh measures and start failing the projects for not enough test coverage. I might feel like an ogre, but at least I’ll be a test first ogre.
Ed Gibbs @ November 21, 2005
Or atleast a testing ogre.
Who knows if they wrote it ‘test first’. Although I suppose if you’re looking at coverage percentages & it’s not really really high, you can bet that they aren’t doing TDD.
Getting developers to do TDD is hard. I haven’t had a lot of success pushing it either. Requires a lot of discipline… Part of the problem might be that J2EE doesn’t make it easy. TDD’ing a stateless session bean, anyone?
A real problem is that developers won’t adopt the practice until they’ve personally experienced the benefits that it can bring.
Rather than just giving a lecture - or maybe after an introductory session to explain the concepts - it seems to require multiple pair programming sessions during which the developer can observe how the process works before they’re willing to change their own development practices.
As Pete said, it requires some initial discipline but once any decent developer sees the improvement in code quality that it brings, they’ll often help promoting adoption of the practice within a team.
At this point I’d be somewhat happy if we had say 50% test coverage. At this point we aren’t at that point on any of our current projects. Part of this is due to adopting too many new technologies at once, but the larger part is my developers still aren’t really convinced of the worth of TDD.
The training I ran last week involved two demos with the developers and two labs where all but one developer were paired up. So apparently that’s not quite enough. Tomorrow I’m moving out of my office into the cubes and pairing up with at least one developer for an hour or two. Hopefully I’ll see some aha moments soon.