Talk at London Geek Night.

Nat and I gave a talk at the most recent London Geek Night. It was an introduction to our approach to Test-Driven Development, incidentally making the point that some of the state- vs. interaction-based TDD wars are a bit specious; it's a matter of picking the right tool for the job. We had a good crowd and some useful questions. Afterwards, there was a Code Dojo in which Nat took part while I got stuck at the back talking to people. Thanks again to our hosts for an interesting evening.

We've uploaded the slides with notes. The format's a little odd because we used the toolchain we use for our courses, but the material's all there.

There are couple of other relevant links. Nils Haugen has a nice talk he did on Improving Test Maintainability, which is about making sure the tests make sense. Our interest is more in the stage after that, which is about listening to what the tests are telling you about the design of your code.

Learn from the source!

Nat, Romilly Cocking, and I are now open for business for training. We have a course on Test-Driven Development that reflects nearly a decade of experience writing tests first (that's 30 years in parallel). We also have significant experience in training, Romilly has a couple of decades on his own, and Nat and I have taught commercially and at two of the top CS departments in the country.

The course teaches the practice of Test-Driven Development, based on a solid understanding of Object-Oriented design, and with a strong emphasis on making tests expressive and maintainable. We also make a point of exploring how unit tests can be used to drive the design of the code, not just protect it.

The content is modular, so we can adjust it to match the needs of the participants. The full-length course is three busy days, and we've taught versions that are a half-day and whole-day long.

We teach the course using jUnit4, Hamcrest, and (of course) jMock2. Talk to us if you want something different.

For more information, contact us at: training@mockobjects.com

Here's what some attendees liked about the course:

“The practical exposure to a better way of testing”

“Practical lab work, real-world concrete examples, Expert lecturers!”

“Chance to make mistakes and learn. Exposure to new technology.”

“A very good whole picture view of TDD and mocks”

“Interaction and explanation of course materials particularly through the exercises.”