Martin Fowler's Blog, page 41

Retrofitting a testing culture into Google

Mike Bland has talked about serious bugs and how a testing culture is a vital tool to prevent them and build the confidence you need to evolve and sustain a code-base. But his story is not just about theory, it’s built on practice - and here is the experience of him and his colleagues in installing a testing culture into Google.

Summary and links for fourth "Is TDD Dead" hangout, final will be on June 4th

I’ve added summary and links from our fourth “Is TDD Dead” podcast to my overview page. This discussion looked at the downsides of testing and TDD: can you do too much testing, and is there a problem with teams valuing tests more than they value the functional code? We’ve set the time for our fifth and final hangout to be on Wednesday June 4th at 1100 Eastern time. This one will be a Q&A - to submit and vote on questions go to the event page and press the play button. We’ll also do some final thoughts and wrap up, which will make this discussion run longer than we’ve done so far (maybe going up to an hour).

ThoughtWorks has also put audio for all the episodes onto its newly relaunched podcast feed.

Unit Testing Culture: other useful tools

Unit testing, while valuable, isn’t the only tool to consider to reduce the chances of catastrophic bugs. In this fourth installment of his article on Goto Fail, Heartbleed, and Unit Testing Culture
Mike Bland discusses these other tools both in contrast to, and as allies to unit testing.

Audio and Video for Third "Is TDD Dead" hangout, fourth will be on May 27

The hangout overview page now has links to the video and audio from the 3rd “Is TDD Dead” hangout, together with my written summary of the hangout. In this session we talk about the trade-offs and nature of feedback and the TDD’s influence on QA. The next hangout will be next Tuesday May 27th at 1100 Eastern time.

Overview page for "Is TDD Dead"

I’ve put together an overview page for our “Is TDD Dead” discussions. It includes links to all the video and audio downloads, summaries of the discussions, and links to things we refer to.

The Costs and Benefits of a Unit Testing Culture

Mike Bland moves on to the third installment of his article on Goto Fail, Heartbleed, and Unit Testing Culture. Here he looks at the significant costs of installing a unit testing culture and compares them to the benefits you gain by doing it - benefits that go beyond just reducing the chances of catastrophic bugs.

Second "Is TDD Dead" Hangout video and audio available, third hangout scheduled

We’ve now completed the second “Is TDD Dead” hangout. You can watch it on YouTube or download an mp3 file if you’d rather not look at our faces. We’ve scheduled the next one for Tuesday May 20th at 1100 Eastern time (same time, but a different day next week, due to our scheduling constraints).

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Duilhac-sous-Peyrepertuse, Languedoc, France

Second Installment of "Goto Fail, Heartbleed, and Unit Testing Culture"

In this second installment Mike Bland takes a look at the Heartbleed bug, showing what kind of unit tests would expose the bug and the testing culture that would encourage these tests to be written. He further stresses that a testing culture wouldn’t consider a bug to be fixed without additional tests and posits a corollary to Linus’s Law.

Second "Is TDD Dead" Hangout with Kent Beck and David Heinemeier Hansson

We’ve sorted out the time and link for the second part of our hangout on “Is TDD Dead”. It will be on Friday May 16 at 11:00 Eastern time. As before the video will be posted on YouTube shortly afterwards. Again it will be about 30 minutes long, with me playing Time Cop to shut us up. The lead-in from last time is to discuss David’s notion of test-induced design damage. David hopes to prepare an example for the base for our discussion, if so we’ll let you know via this feed and our twitter stream so you can do the pre-reading.