Comments on: How We Do Things – Evolving our TDD/BDD Practice

By: kerrrtivolsafdf

kerrrtivolsafdf — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:55:56 +0000

Thanks dude. This was fun reading

By: Scott C Reynolds

Scott C Reynolds — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:09:47 +0000

@sm

you have to fight back at all times against a culture that reinforces individual ownership and does so to facilitate the playing of “the blame game”. I’ll talk about this more in a later post.

By: SM

SM — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:29:55 +0000

We are a .NET shop with a team size of 10. The company requires a developer to take ownership of the feature he/she develops and the developer essentially becomes a subject matter expert for that feature. An architect tried to encourage pair programming but it soon fell apart as there was no longer a single person who would own the feature and the blame game started when things didn’t go too well

By: SM

SM — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:29:18 +0000

By: Scott C Reynolds

Scott C Reynolds — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:13:09 +0000

@Zaki

All I can tell you is one step at a time. We had a large legacy codebse interfering with our ability to do tdd too. we just started working with it one feature at a time, doing what we could, when we could.

If you haven’t already, read Michael Feathers Working Effectively with Legacy Code. It helped us immensely.

By: Zaki Shaheen

Zaki Shaheen — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 08:09:17 +0000

A really neat and elaborate post – in fact the whole series. I feel that I should comment here because I’m going through a lot of what you went through. We’re doing .NET application development as well and the product, though small compared to other products in the company, is quite extensively used internally. We have contract tests for the most core things, but where we lag is GUI testing.

You points about mentoring and how its not just about TDD – and that you cannot just dive into it is quite true. If you are a lone programmer then yes, but with a team of 7-8 and geo-distributed its really hard. Pair programming seems impossible. What we are facing right now is that TDD itself is seeming difficult because we have a large code base, its very entangled and coupled to UI and we have our own build system. Getting up and running on TDD inside visual studio is one thing, integrating it with ur build enviornment is another. And the nightmare is here, they want us to break the whole application down into controls which other products would be using.

I hope I can learn a lot from you experiences. Thanks.

By: Martin Larsen

Martin Larsen — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:12:58 +0000

Thanks for this series of posts. Being in a position where I try to push Agile and TDD practices in a shop where software has been developed almost the same way for the last 15 years, It is really useful for me to hear about some real world experience.

It is especially nice to hear someone else who haved faced the same problems as I do tell about what they found working and what didn’t.

Looking forward to more episodes.