Skip to main content

You are NOT Agile if there's no Test Driven Development

Yes YOU. Company, team, manager or programmer.

You tried to tell me your job requires "Proven track record in delivering features in agile environment". You listed in your linked in profile that you have "Extensive experience with Agile projects". You describe your company as "Practising the latest Agile development techniques".

Bullshit!

If you're not doing Test Driven Development you're not agile. You're not Scrum. You're not XP. You're not Kanban. You'd be lucky to be classified as LEAN.

Okay so TDD didn't make it into the Manifesto and maybe it should have. But all the ideas that built towards that manifesto included TDD as a key part of how programming should be done. You can argue about being 80% agile or that an agile technique for one company shouldn't be identical to the next. Fine! But you damn well better have TDD front and centre of that plan!

Why is it so important? Because agile development isn't about changing management practises. It's about changing ALL your practises and that programmers are the most important part in developing software. Let me say that again because I think a lot of companies like to ignore it. Programmers are the most important part in developing software. If your programmers are doing the same thing before agile as they are after except for a few meetings they go to then nothing of substance has really changed.

So quit the bullshit. I don't care if you're not doing any agile techniques. Or if you like to call your regular meeting a "scrum" or a "standup". Just don't tell me you ARE practising agile and wonder why my jaw drops when you say "oh we sometimes write a few tests but we never to test driven development".

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

RestFixture

So most of the tests I'm writing now in Fitnesse are using RestFixture . Being able to do all this black box style testing has helped me get a lot of tests up and running without having to change the existing code base. Now I've taken a step future with my own little fork  so I can use scenarios and build nice BDD style scripts. But first I want to give me own quick guide to using RestFixture Step 1: Installing You can dive straight in by grabbing the latest jar files for RestFixture here  https://github.com/smartrics/RestFixture/downloads If you know what you're doing can get the nodep version to work nicely along side other libraries you may be including in Fitnesse. But I grabbed the 'full' version and unzipped it into a RestFixture folder alongside my FitNesseRoot folder. Step 2: Write your first test I took advantage of the built in Fitnesse api as a basic test and wrote a page called RestFixture with the following contents !define TEST_SYSTEM {slim} !

A brief introduction

And then I'll get into my first rant. I'm some guy who thinks about stuff. Stuff you probably don't care about but I'm going to tell you anyway! Now I don't think I'm going to cure cancer or create world peace but it'd be nice if I could make the world a little better. Stuff I'd like to talk about will focus on: Games I've always been a game player and am fascinated in how one designs a game. Yes it's mostly computer games these days and even then it's mostly consumed by World of Warcraft . Shut-up you in the back! We all have our vices and I'll avoid sniggering at your hentai collection if you leave my level 80 mage alone. Programming Only 2 years ago I was introduced to this weird concept of Test Driven Developmen t and the broader concept of Agile . Programming has been part of my life since I was eight. When I haven't been doing it professionally I've found myself doing it more in my free time. So it's nice that after 20+