How I’m Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
Posted by admin in Development on February 8, 2010
Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests (that’s #goos on Twitter) by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce is a book about test-driven development. Here are a few notes on my experiences of following its methods.
The Story So Far
I was fortunate enough to start work on a new desktop application in the middle of last year, around the time I read through the freely-available online version of the book before it was finally published in November. This was an ideal opportunity to put TDD into practice so I started by building a “walking skeleton” using Prism, CruiseControl.NET, WiX, Gallio, MbUnit, NCover and White as a wrapper around UI Automation for the acceptance tests, and took it from there.
I’ll admit that there was a slow start (WPF/Prism and White/UI Automation were new to me too) but development speed has been steadily increasing ever since, and now I’m able to get what feels like a lot done each day. And that’s pretty much every day; it’s been a long time since I’ve had to halt progress for a significant amount of time in order to squash a bug or redo a chunk of work.
Where am I now?
I’m still learning. It’s easy to slip back into changing code then updating the tests to match, and I do find myself doing that sometimes. I’m also finding it hard to perform only one refactoring step at a time (oh, let me just rename that class while I’m here…), and the acceptance tests can be brittle and sometimes feel like a burden to write. But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? It’s getting noticeably easier as I learn and improve, and every bit of pain along the way has been worth it.
Does it work?
For me, yes. Test-driven development feels so right that I don’t think I could ever go back to hacking stuff together without building the safety net of tests to fall back on as I go. I am sure that my design is much better than anything I have produced before, and that I have far fewer bugs than usual, too 
So this experience has been nothing short of (professional) life-changing. I have read similar stuff before, but GOOS was the one that finally made me “get it.”
Hello again, World!
GraemeF.com has been around in one form or another since 2001, but I had a poke around the blog content and decided that each bit fell into one or more of the following categories:
- Outdated technical posts that would be downright misleading now;
- Personal stuff that the Interwebs should not be interested in;
- Links auto-posted from my Del.icio.us account;
- Factually inaccurate bullshit.
So, rather than actually create categories for the above, I decided to reboot my blog, and now all of the old content is gone.
So what now?
It’s time for a fresh start. Having dabbled with product management for a while and ultimately decided that it’s not for me, I’m back to being a full-time software developer, and that’s what I intend to write about.
However, what’s more likely to happen is:
- I start off well, with a couple of posts about test driven development and the like;
- The posts get shorter and shorter and are spaced farther and farther apart;
- In a year’s time I’ve all but forgotten about it when the hosting charge is applied to my debit card, for which my wife never forgives me.
Sounds like a plan!