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 Three Laws of TDD

Follow these rules until you gain enough experience in TDD or until you feel confident enough to break them (like Picasso).

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) formalized the TDD rules: The three rules of TDD are detailed at http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.TheThreeRulesOfTdd.

1. You Are Not Allowed to Write Any More of a Unit Test That Is Sufficient to Fail, and Compilation Failures Are Failures

Start by writing one failing unit test. We don't want to write all the tests beforehand as sometimes the implementation will suggest a test we had not envisioned before. If we write all tests beforehand, we may miss some important test scenarios. TDD is a feedback loop that works both ways. We not only get feedback from failing and passing tests, production code also gives feedback on needed tests.

Make sure the test is failing for the right reason. An unexpected fail is not a valid failure (such failures could include unexpected exceptions thrown, missing...