TDD Class Part Duex

test driven development, software development

Ran my second class on TDD with JUnit today. Now the bulk of our developers have been exposed to TDD directly, but I think there’s still a lot of work to do to nail down real adoption. One of the issues is quite a few people in the class don’t actually get to code in Java all that often so their actual skills are pretty rusty. That made it a lot harder to get through the labs.

I was pleased that two of the QA staff made it to the training and actually got some hands on with the labs. I think QA and development in our organization are starting to work a lot more closely together. Focusing developers on testing can only help.

I was also really pleased that the group helped each other out with a lot of pairing. Even with the three labs I didn’t get tons of requests for help. Of course I might have missed something and they were just content to struggle alone, but I don’t think so.

And I did learn some presentation training lessons some for the second or third time:

• Always be fully prepared. I changed the Keynote presentation up til the Friday afternoon before so I couldn’t get the slides printed until Monday morning and I spent 2 hours doing it. If I had finished them and sent them to the internal print shop–bang an hour later, bound PDF copies.
• When bringing snacks for the afternoon to keep people awake, don’t just get things like peanut M&Ms since some people may be allergic.
• Always setup the machines ahead of time fully. (I was saved here by the fact that it was a pretty technical group and they helped each other out, including putting the labs on a shared drive and not a CD, duh.)

I left the group with the idea that as soon as possible they should go ahead and really try out TDD for about two weeks so they could get a much better feel for it. If most of them try that out this class will have been a wild success. In the meantime I’ll be trying to do a lot more pairing with my own developers. I’m hoping to have a few test infected converts eventually.

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software development, test driven development

Ed Gibbs @ January 30, 2006