Test Driven Development Live!

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I don't feel this talk serves the modern developer well other than a quick introduction to what Unit Testing and Test Driven Development are. The library used to demonstrate writing tests is SimpleTest, which is often considered legacy compared to PHPUnit. It might be more useful to demonstrate with PHPUnit, although both libraries at the basic level are very similar. Jason did add a disclaimer that he has contributed to SimpleTest.

Writing tests can seem tedious, but I don't think live-coding the examples, and not being able to code them quickly, kills any type of rhythm to the talk. Code could be prepared before the talk and still communicate the same ideas. Use the time saved to advocate best practices of how to best do TDD as testing strategies are shown.

I enjoyed the way Jason has given this live demo on TDD and liked the beer prizes with the content quizzes.
Also nice to see that SimpleTest works the same way as PHPUnit, makes it easy to switch from one to the other.
Maybe a little too much entry level for people already writing unit tests but not yet in a TDD way, but still a great session. Might want to indicate this in the abstract.

Anonymous at 15:26 on 25 May 2011

Everything johnkary complained about is what I loved about this talk. Having not had an opportunity to interact with unit tests or test driven development up to now, I finally feel like I understand how it works. Being able to code along with Jason made it even better.

Quite possibly my favourite talk so far.

Good introduction to the TDD workflow.

Decent TDD introduction, brave to do the tests live but I think it's important to show the workflow - and that does mean it takes a bit of time. Jason said this was originally a tutorial session, and it is clear that there's a lot more that could be shown, but I think for developers new to unit testing and TDD, the talk gave a basis for going away and understanding the aims and the process. The only thing I would have perhaps wanted would be more practical advice or war stories of using this on real code, but being as the talk served as a general introduction to unit testing as well, I'm not sure there was really room in the slot.

II agree with anonymous that it was a great overview for any kind of developer on test driven development and running unit tests. I thought Jason did a great job of taking a 3 hour lab, distilling it into an hour and still making it interactive and hands on. Would love to see his full session sometime.

Speeches with live development usually lack dynamic and this one suffer this issue as well. It was a good introduction but it is impossible to give real taste of TDD in such short time. I would suggest to keep 3 hours format of the speech and dive deep into TDD be the end. The technique is awesome and can be helpful for everyone. Thank you for the speech anyway

I liked this as a presentation into TTD, and the demo was good. I now have a much better understanding of how it works and how I can use it.