Agile Coach Journal

While reading Scott Bain’s great book Emergent Design, I was reminded of a story. It took place a couple of years ago inside a very tall building in a very large city. I was giving an early version of my Test Driven Development workshop. There were about 25 developers to entertain. I asked the standard calibration questions:

-    How many of you are doing TDD now? Answer: none
-    How many of you do unit testing? Answer: none
-    How many of you know what unit testing is? Answer: some
-    Of those of you who know what it is, do you think it is a good idea? Answer: yes
-    Why, then, do you not do it? Answer: we don’t have time

It was not an unusual set of answers, of course. I have had that same dialog with more than one group.

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Last week I was doing a training session in Melbourne, Australia. I had an especially energetic and interested group of people to work with. In basic agile training, a 1.5 day workshop, I introduced Test Driven Development very briefly, cutting it short because we were going to spend the whole next day doing a TDD lab. I mainly gave a sales pitch including the statement that, after decades of writing software, learning TDD made me a better programmer by at least a factor of four. That is a pretty fuzzy claim, but I made it for effect.

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Popularity: 16% [?]