TITLE: Upcoming TDD Tutorial AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: July 29, 2004 8:15 AM DESC: preparing for SugarLoafPLoP ----- BODY: Today I am working on an invited tutorial that I will be giving at the Fourth Latin American Conference on the Pattern Languages of Programs, affectionately known as SugarLoafPLoP 2004. The conference is August 10 through 13 in Porto das Dunas, a resort town in the north of Brazil. I am also serving as program co-chair for the conference. Being a program chair for a PLoP conference can be quite time consuming, but this has not been too bad. My Brazilian co-chair, Paulo Borba, has done a lot of work, especially with submissions written in Portugese, and the conference chair, Rossana Andrade, has shouldered most of the responsibility for the conference schedule. This has left me to focus on the writers workshop program for authors working in English and with handling basic inquiries from authors and presenters. My tutorial is on test-driven development (TDD). I plan first to give some background on extreme programming (XP) and TDD's place in it, and then to introduce the practices, supporting tools, and "theory" of TDD through a pair programming demonstration. Lecturing on how to do something always seems like a bad idea when you can do it and talk about it at the same time. One of the things I've been thinking a lot about is how practicing TDD can both help and hinder the evolution of good design, and how other practices such as refactoring work with TDD to even better effect. I hope for my talk to convey the "rhythm" of TDD and how it changes one's mindset about writing programs. On my way to SugarLoafPLoP, I am giving a talk to the Centro de Informática at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Recifé. I think that this talk will also be on TDD, with a focus on interaction-based testing with mock objects. I've been learning about this idea from a recent article by Martin Fowler. I could always still talk on elementary patterns, which is the work closest to my heart, but it seems more convenient to mine the same thread of material that's occupying my mind most deeply right now. This is my first trip outside of North America, so I'm looking forward several new experiences! Now, back to those talks... -----