TITLE: Upcoming TDD Tutorial
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 29, 2004 8:15 AM
DESC: preparing for SugarLoafPLoP
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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...
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