{"id":21,"date":"2004-07-14T23:48:33","date_gmt":"2004-07-14T21:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=21"},"modified":"2004-07-14T23:57:03","modified_gmt":"2004-07-14T22:57:03","slug":"how-big-are-your-steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=21","title":{"rendered":"How big are your steps?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I re-ran my An Introduction to Test-Driven Development<\/a> session yesterday…to an exceptionally interactive and responsive audience. <\/p>\n

The slides are free to download here<\/a> (1134k). Feel free to download the Delphi 5-7<\/a> code, the Delphi 8<\/a> code or the Visual Basic.net<\/a> code.<\/p>\n

I was using DUnit<\/a> with Delphi 7. I re-iterated the fact that eXtreme Programming and TDD extol the virtues of “doing the simplest thing that could possibly work”. <\/p>\n

Read more about the session here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Tied in with this debate was a lengthy discussion about the concept of “small steps”. <\/p>\n

Early on in my session I took lots of really small steps, panicking the audience slightly as they wondered how long it would take me to get from 1 to 2000 in Roman numerals (I was applying TDD to a Roman numeral conversion class).<\/p>\n

TDD promotes the notion of taking plenty of small steps, gradually taking slightly larger steps as your confidence increases. However, the instant you step over your mark and take a step that’s too large, you should revert to taking smaller steps until to regain your confidence.<\/p>\n

The size of TDD steps is important and it’s one that you have to be happy with yourself: a “small step” that works for you might be a large step to somebody else. It’s about finding a happy medium – go out and try TDD for yourself, make the mistakes that I did, take large steps, try to do too much in a method and test. It’ll all come out in the wash and eventually as Erich Gamma<\/a> said, you’ll be “test infected<\/a>”<\/p>\n

Want to learn more about TDD? These books are highly recommended:<\/p>\n

\"Test-Driven<\/a>
\n \"Test-Driven<\/a><\/p>\n

Test-Driven Development: a practical guide: Reviewed here.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Test-Driven<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During a test-driven development session, the size of your steps (the amount of work you try to achieve in one go) varies…and it’s very personal: your steps might be bigger than mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development","category-tdd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}