Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By : Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia
Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By: Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia

Overview of this book

The number of popular technical practices has grown exponentially in the last few years. Learning the common fundamental software development practices can help you become a better programmer. This book uses the term Agile as a wide umbrella and covers Agile principles and practices, as well as most methodologies associated with it. You’ll begin by discovering how driver-navigator, chess clock, and other techniques used in the pair programming approach introduce discipline while writing code. You’ll then learn to safely change the design of your code using refactoring. While learning these techniques, you’ll also explore various best practices to write efficient tests. The concluding chapters of the book delve deep into the SOLID principles - the five design principles that you can use to make your software more understandable, flexible and maintainable. By the end of the book, you will have discovered new ideas for improving your software design skills, the relationship within your team, and the way your business works.
Table of Contents (31 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1
7
Section 2
13
Section 3
19
Section 4
25
Chapter 21
28
License: CyberDojo

The Classic TDD Approach

The classic TDD approach revolves around the idea of creating messy code and constantly refactoring it to clean it up. The mess in classic TDD is critical, since it provides feedback for refactoring the design.

The ideas of implementing the simplest thing that can work, and deferring important design decisions, are at the heart of classic TDD. The refactoring phase in classic TDD is vital; hence, good refactoring skills are key to its success. So having an understanding about code smells, the SOLID principles, and cohesion/coupling and connascence is a major advantage in changing the shape of the code before the mess turns into code that's too difficult to refactor.

The importance of the mess is highlighted by the Rule of Three, which stops us from premature refactors, maximizing the feedback to find the right pattern. The secret to this style of TDD lies in having the right amount of mess to provide feedback for design decisions, but not so much...