Thursday, March 20, 2008

[dotnet] Test-Driven Development

Kiaora Zac,

I’m going to get ridiculed by true, OO developers like Owen, but I’ll give you my 10c. Having read the sum total of 1 MSDN article about it (and numerous Geek group discussions), I decided to give it a try. I found it easy to install and easy to use.  However, it didn’t fit my design methodology.  Let me elaborate. I use Strongly-Typed Datasets (instead of ORM) and don’t use MVC.  I like declarative programming and minimalist event-driven coding.  I code from the data model rather than the class definitions.  Maybe I should use MVC, but because I don’t, then I found TDD was of limited use to me. When I changed an interface (e.g. modified a stored proc), then TDD was very good at reminding me that I needed to flow through the changes to the BLL.  What it wasn’t any good at was helping me to pin-point everywhere in the Presentation layer where I’d used that ObjectDataSource (I guess Find All would do it). Having just read Owens response (I might have guessed he’d get in first), I agree that he’s top-down and I’m bottom-up.  I don’t have an issue with that.

Blessings,
James Hippolite
Senior .NET Developer – Workgroup Solutions Team


From: dotnet@dot.net.nz [mailto:dotnet@dot.net.nz] On Behalf Of Zac Seth
Sent: Thursday, 20 March 2008 1:07 p.m.
To: dotnet@dot.net.nz
Subject: [dotnet] Test-Driven Development -->

Hi All, I have an early Friday arvo question for you: Are you/your organisation:

  1. Currently using Test-Driven Development (TDD),
  2. Hoping/planning to use TDD,
  3. Not planning to use or not interested in TDD.
For those of you that are using TDD, how are you finding it? What are the pros and cons that you find using it in your environment? Would you ever consider developing without it? How painful was it to transition into? If you have any other thoughts on the subject I’d love to hear them. Cheers, Zac Seth  |  Developer  |  Netfinity Limited
phone: +64 9 308 5494  |  mob: +64 21 310 308
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