Journey to TDD - Getting It

If you found this article and want to start at the beginning, this series starts here.

I wrote attending a Code Retreat opened me up to modern software development. Pair programming, testing, refactoring, oh my!

Did that mean that after one session, I was a TDD master??

Oh I wish!

This was only the first step in my journey to test driven development. It’s an important one because without the hands on aspect of the Code Retreat, I would not be able figure out how to apply the tenet of test driven development:

Write tests first then the smallest passing test.

I love that the TDD tenet is simple and I hate that it is simple.

Reflecting on this journey, I see this about test driven development:

If you only know about test driven development from reading about it, you won’t get it. If you do test driven development, you get it.

So there’s almost a chicken-egg or catch-22 situation here (i.e. how can I get it without knowing about it?)

In a way, this is what a Code Retreat solves - you just “get it”, then figure out what to know about it.

Now that I understood software development, what did I do to improve?