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

Chapter 2

Classic TDD I – Test-Driven Development

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

– Martin Fowler

When I was developing software for automated cash machines, we created a simple Graphical User Interface (GUI) to test our code. The GUI was a plain window full of small buttons, each performing a specific operation.

To perform a test, an operator would press the buttons on the GUI. The granularity of the operations was so fine that to run a test, an operator had to press several buttons in a specific sequence.

We did not have automated sequences, nor were we generating any reports. Nevertheless, we were very proud of our test GUIs. The quality assurance engineers loved them, and they were a lifesaver on many occasions.

This had little resemblance to Test-Driven Development (TDD), but at that time, TDD had not been invented yet. However, the high value provided by...