I survived another SVCC iteration

Silicon Valley Code Camp version 4.0 took place this week-end, and was a big success, judging by the numbers and the happy faces. Congratulations to Peter Kellner and the team for a tremendous organization!

Personally, I wanted to give a big thank-you to the people who attended my session on Test-Driven Development – and for bearing with my voice, which was pretty shaky. I got sick this week and wasn’t sure until Saturday evening if I could do it, because on Thursday my voice was totally gone. I think I had more herbal tea with honey this week than in my entire life, but you guys made it all worth it: I had a great time giving my presentation, and you guys rocked! As I said during the session, the theory behind TDD is pretty succinct, so there isn’t much in the slides themselves worth posting. Instead, I thought I would list a few pointers:

NUnit: you can find it here. I recommend checking out the Quick Start page, which covers most of what you need to start writing unit tests. I have written a post on data-driven tests here.

While we are talking about tools, I haven’t presented it during the session, but I really like TestDriven.Net. There is a free community version for your personal use. It’s a Visual Studio add-on which allows you to run and debug your tests from Visual Studio.

Even though it’s a Java book, and this session was for .NET developers, I really recommend Kent Beck’s book Test-Driven Development by Example. It’s very easy to read, and will get you started on the right foot. It’s also very well written – one of my favorite books!

The other book I recommend is the Art of Unit Testing, by Roy Osherove. I just finished it, and I wish I had it with me a few years ago, when I began writing tests seriously :) The book is technically about unit testing and not TDD, and it is a .NET book. I highly recommend it, it is chock-full of good advice, and covers way more than just testing. That’s it! If you are interested in either the slides or code, let me know, and I’ll gladly post them, too. In the meanwhile, thanks again for coming, and… happy testing!