This course is designed to bring about a fundamental change to the way developers go about their day-to-day business of writing software code. Instead of thinking about unit tests as at best an afterthought, having already written the application code, the course aims to turn this practice on its head, and get programmers to write tests before the code to be tested.
Originating in the Agile methodology of Extreme Programming, Test Driven Development (TDD) has become accepted as a mainstream best practice, and is being adopted by major organisations as means of improving code quality and developer productivity.
Because Test Driven Development involves such a major inversion of most developers' ways of thinking and working, the course is strongly exercise based - it is necessary to spend a large part of the two days of the workshop practicing test-first development.
Typically developers find TDD initially strange, but go on to find it quite liberating, and become 'test infected' (unable to write code without having first devised unit tests.)
The exercises are based on the Java programming language, and use the tools most central to TDD in Java, including Eclipse (students are free to use tools they are comfortable with), JUnit and some of its extensions, Hamcrest, mocking with jMock and developing system level TDD scripts using fitnesse.
