Test Driven Development Example

I recently presented Clarke Ching's TDD in Excel example to upper management at the company I work for. The example follows through the development of an Integer to Roman numeral converter using Excel as the test harness. It took about 35 minutes to get to 15 fully refactored and 10 minutes for questions and discussion. I was nervous as hell but managed to get through the code with out too many problems. I thought I was clunky in places but one of the managers said the presentation was really slick so it must have looked better from the outside. I volunteered to present it again for any team that was interested so I should have some more experience for when I do it at Agile Scotland (http://agilescotland.blogspot.com/) later this month.


All the feedback so far has been really positive. One of the other managers said it was excellent at getting the point of TDD across. We talked about clean, beautiful code and how it motivates programmers. I think it was the first time my boss had heard of that or even considered that producing high quality code could motivate programmers. I don't think he's ever heard off that before but many of the managers listening started chipping in examples of their own. It was really good.


As a demo for managers I think that it really stood up. It got the point across without losing them. I think some of the programming was beyond my boss (he's not a programmer after all) but the frequent switches back to the tests kept him interested and he could see the power when I made a mistake, got instant feedback, fix it and ran the tests again. I think 15 was enough for this demo. When I was doing 1 – 8 there is a slight stall before you refactor at 8 and I think next time I'll try to fill that somehow. Apart from that it went swimmingly


Here is the example if you'd like to try it for yourself



http://www.clarkeching.com/2006/04/test_driven_dev.html