In a podcast I listened to earlier this week from PythonTesting, Test & Code podcast, I was able to hear from the “father” of TDD himself Kent Beck. In this podcast, the host Brian took snippets from a Software Engineering radio podcast (Episode 167) that, what he thought, would have the most impact on the listener.
These are the 5 things Brian decided to look at:
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You’re tests should tell a story.
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Be careful of DRY, inheritance, and other software development practices that might get in the way of keeping your tests easy to understand.
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All test should help differentiate good programs from bad programs and not be redundant.
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Test at multiple levels and multiple scales where it makes sense.
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Differentiating between TDD, BDD, ATDD, etc. isn’t as important as testing your software to learn about it. Who cares what you call it.
One interesting thing I noted from this was point number 2. Being careful of writing test that align with common software design practices. This kind of went hand-in-hand with point 1 where he says your tests should tell a story. Each individual test should tell the person reading it, what was being accomplished at that given point. For example if you try to use the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) philosophy then you won’t be able to see that story as well in your tests because you’ve tried consolidating the repeats.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Tyler Lundstrom by CS@Worcester – Tyler Lundstrom and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.