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in reply to Winning people over to better development practises

When I gave a lunchtime talk evangelizing TDD (Test Driven Development), I summarised the benefits as follows:

Note that the first point above is the most important.

Update: Some further points added later from Effective Automated Testing:

The talk was well-received and did change both development practices and management awareness. I also illustrated each point with specific examples from our workplace (e.g. a developer refactoring without a test suite causing a rush of new bug reports from customers).

See Also

Updated 19-Mar-2006: Improved wording. Also note that many of the ideas for these bullet points were derived from chromatic and Schwern's excellent Test::Tutorial talk. See also Unit testing -- module, book, and website suggestions wanted. Updated 23-Aug-2018: Minor improvements to wording (keep in sync with Effective Automated Testing). See also You've gotta have tests! by talexb. July-2019: Added See also section.

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Re^2: Winning people over to better development practises
by simon.proctor (Vicar) on Mar 14, 2006 at 10:23 UTC
    Thanks, that's a good list to start with.

    I wondered, did you find it difficult to handle some people in winning them over to this? How did that change over time?

      I wondered, did you find it difficult to handle some people in winning them over to this?

      For the people in my team, I had no difficulties whatsoever because I could sit with them and show them how to do it (as adrianh notes below: "show not tell").

      For people in other teams, it depended on their interest and aptitude: some really surprised me by writing excellent unit tests without any prodding at all; others didn't seem to get it; others complained that they didn't have the time. Nobody said it was a stupid idea, the most common reason for not doing it was "I have a hard deadline and I just don't have the time right now, maybe I'll try it on my next project".

      How did that change over time?

      It's been over a year now, and TDD is growing slowly but steadily as the early adopters spread the word and show others how to do it. There are a certain percentage of programmers (maybe more than half) that don't read or study anything outside of work; the only way to reach them is to sit with them and show them how to do it.