Ping Pong Development to Teach TDD

test driven development, software development

I came across a post by Dave Hoover explaining a technique he called Ping Pong Programming.

• Developer A writes a new test and gets a red bar.
• Developer B implements the code to get to a green bar.
• Developer B writes the next test.
• Developer A implements it.

And of course you’re allowed to refactor where ever reasonable. I hadn’t thought about this in respect to pairing up with my developers as I try to get them hooked on TDD, but it seems a very good pattern for learning how the process works. And of course it becomes sort of a fun competitive game.

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software development, test driven development, tdd

Ed Gibbs @ January 22, 2006