Agile Coach Journal

My favorite class to teach is TDD. I like to challenge developers to stretch their brains into new territory. They do it every day in other ways. Learning TDD is a level higher than solving algorithm and design challenges. It is about changing the way you approach programming altogether. And my favorite situation is to see the light go on in the mind of someone who starts out as a skeptic. “I’m here because my boss said I had to go” kind of people. Great fun.
Sometime I get challenges back. By now, after doing this for a few years, I can answer many of the predicatable questions pretty easily. Every once in a while I get some harder questions. I thought I would share some of these and the answers I came up with.

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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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