Château de Massillan, Uchaux, by Alvaro Costa

TDD in-depth — insights from an Ensemble programming workshop

On March 2022, I went to a SocratesFR event with a few colleagues. During an ensemble programming session, where we have chosen to do a kata on Game of Life, as to exercise our skills and discover GoLang, a.k.a GOo. As participants, we had Tanguy HERMANN who volunteer as Go expert to guide us through, Jonathan LAURENT as expert on Game of Life, Emmanuel CONRARDY, Laurent ARCHIMEDE and I were newbies to both Go and Game Of Life. After this workshop, I feel it is worth to share the return of experience.

There are four interesting findings to mention :

1. First, the confrontation of two approaches, i.e business rules driven vs behaviour driven. We will detail this below, and see which one is better.
2. Then, we were bumping into baby steps dilemma, where we were questioning ourselves about doing baby steps vs skipping some steps
3. In addition, we needed to clarify things during TDD iterations, but what matters in there?
4. Last, we may simply mis-use or misunderstand it. What if we force ourselves too far in trying so it is very hard to employ it on the field.

Let’s just remind a few things about TDD.

Test-Driven-Development — a.k.a — TDD