Podcasts and epiphanies
Okay, I’ve been bitten by the podcast bug. Listening, not creating. Now I’m trawling through old stuff I missed because I was still reading blogs. IT Conversations is proving valuable.
Here’s one I heard this weekend from Kent Beck on developer testing (recorded November 2004!). TDD and refactoring are the two big software development epiphanies for me in the last 4-5 years, and Beck literally wrote the book on TDD.
In this podcast Beck highlights the accountability aspect of TDD, and it resonated big time for me. I was also encouraged by his comments on his own difficulties writing tests being due to “not being a good enough designer. Yet.” I think that stance/insight would help more developers move into TDD.
This is reflections on, not an introduction to, TDD — for that, I don’t know a better treatment than his short, participatory text. I think it’s hard to really get it until you intentionally write that stupid little hardcoded implementation that you’re going to change in a minute … just after you write the next test.