I came across this interesting thread on TDD. Why Isn’t TDD More Popular in Universities

• raises questions about TDD in teaching curiculum
• shows how misunderstood TDD is
• raises question of Computer Science vs Software Engineering

In Software Art Thou: What Do You Mean? Kevlin Henney weaves together thoughts from literature, design, and software development.

• what is the meaning of abstraction
• what is the meaning of semantics
• code as an expression of ideas and knowledge
• and a whole lot more

Kevlin Henney’s great talk on Structure and Interpretation of Test Cases

In Improving your Test Driven Development in 45 minutes Jakub Nabrdalik recounts lessons he learned about:

• testing too low or too high
• unit testing methods and classes is an anti-pattern
• writing tests as specifications, “go to the whiteboard”
• creating DSLs to provide test comprehension
• failure of “business” or product owners to use gerkin
• test pyramid speed at different levels
• test optimizations, such as in-memory database
• strategies for integration testing

In Refactoring and Design Skills for Test Driven Development, (2013) Roy Osherove presents an overview of testing and design concepts and two tutorials on greenfield TDD refactoring and legacy test refactoring. The first third is filled with a reading list of books on testing and software design. The two turorials are interesting and worth watching.

In the wonderfully iconoclastic polemic, The Dehumanization of Agile and Objects, (2017) James Coplien maps out

• how we got here from Toyota Production System (TPS) and Simula
• programming in classes or in objects?
• the importance of users over customers
• the lost promise of the Design Movements
• and many more…

In TDD Pairing Session 1 with Raymond Lim and Roy Osherove a Go domain expert and TDD expert pair to develop a Go Game engine using TDD. The session touches on:

• write failing test first
• write simplest implementation that passes
• pause to refactor code and/or test
• switch keyboard

In TDD - The Bad Parts, Matt Parker of Pivotal Labs talks about some test smells he’s encountered

• inverted test pyramid
• outside in testing
• mocks
• unit testing per class/method
• test coverage
• integration/contract/component testing

In Specs vs Tests, Uncle Bob explores the differences and similarities of these testing approaches in the context of TDD. The user comments provide additional insights. Some of the take aways:

• spec is more natural for expressing the what instead of the how of code
• duplication of the specify string and the expect/should code

In Introducing BDD, Dan North summarizes how his thinking evolved from TDD to BDD.

In JS Unit Testing Good Practices & Horrible Mistakes (GOTO 2013) Roy Osherove shares lots of really good observations and experiences about testing software. Although the title has “JS Unit Testing” the talk covers software testing in general - just the examples are JavaScript.

• first principles of being readable, maintainable, trustworthy
• pitfalls of unit testing
• how to correctly use mocks
• why not to mix unit and integration tests
• illustrated examples from actual open source test code
• test code antipatterns, illustrated with code reviews
• patterns for naming and structuring tests for readability