Red Squirrel Reflections Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development

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When TDD is no longer Extreme
Monday, November 10, 2003

"...the key is to know in advance what we're building so we're confident it will meet our needs, and so we can test it." page 318, William Grosso, Java RMI

This quote caught my eye this morning as I was reading on the train. William has made it clear throughout the book that he is a fan of XP and unit testing. He even devotes an entire chapter to developing a homegrown multi-threaded test fixture for remote servers. It's good stuff.

And yet, a quote like the above doesn't smack extreme to me. I found myself immediately rewriting the sentence in the margin...

"The key is to test in advance what we're building so we're confident it will meet our needs."

While I am happily surprised to find numerous XP references in a purely technical book, I wonder how long it will take for technical authors, editors, and publishers to take the step off the cliff into the world of the extreme. I wonder how much longer it will be until test-driven development is popular enough that it will be advocated in literature that is not explicitly focused on testing, development processes, or agile development? I suppose it will happen when TDD is no longer viewed as extreme.

Replies: 2 comments

Rod Johnson's book, /J2EE Design and Development/, talks explicitly about the XP approach to testing and how to do it in a J2EE environment. That's a book published in October 2002. I'm sure there are others. I believe TDD is becoming mainstream even though other parts of XP (pair programming, YAGNI) remain controversial.

Posted by Christian Murphy on 11/11/2003

Alas, while I believe in some aspects of XP, I don't really subscribe to the "rewrite." I think the original sentence was much better (and much truer to a more complete process of software development).

Bill

P.S. You shouldn't be surprised by the XP references. I was hanging around the original wiki way back when Kent Beck and Ron Jeffries were formulating XP (mostly as a skeptical onlooker, but still. I've been hanging around the margins of XP for a long long time).

Posted by William Grosso on 11/23/2003

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