January 2018

Time, finally, for the steering premise, from the five underplayed TDD premises. The steering premise says "tests & testability help steer design & development". What we’re saying here is that tests are first-class citizens in the mob of factors that shape our system, with a voice that counts, all the way through development. Think of the factors we take in to account when we make software. They range all over, from market considerations, to platform, from our geek skillset to

Today, let’s talk a little about the chaining premise, from five underplayed tdd premises. The chaining premise says "test a chain by testing its links". Like the other premises, it’s easy to make it pithy, but it has vast ramifications about when we’re doing TDD. When we talked about the money premise, I gave a long, likely partial, list of ways TDD supports that premise. Did you notice I never mentioned the customer? TDD is for developers. The people it

The judgment premise is one of five underplayed tdd premises. The judgment premise is simple to word and vast in its extent. It says, "tdd relies absolutely on individual humans using their human judgment." you might ask yourself, "what doesn’t rely on human judgment?" but there are lots and lots of activities that are entirely mechanical, judgment-less, and geekery is full of them. We work with judgment-less systems every day. We call them "computers".there’s merit to "algorithmizing", that is, making

Five underplayed premises of TDD includes the correlation premise. The correlation premise says "internal quality and productivity are directly correlated". Confusions and misunderstandings around this premise abound furiously, so it’s worth taking some time and working it out in detail. When we say internal quality (IQ) and productivity are directly correlated, we mean that they go up together and they, sadly, go down together. Their trend lines are inextricably linked. The first thing we have to do to parse this

We talked about five underplayed tdd premises before, here’s a video & transcript. over the next couple of weeks, I’d like to take a little time and go over each of them in more depth. Today, let’s start with the money premise. The money premise says: "we’re in this for the money." TDD is fundamentally about making money. In software, we make make money by Shipping More Value Faster (SMVF). I’ve been doing, teaching, writing, arguing, and coaching TDD for