Agile Otter Blog

Dealing with product health is simple in theory. You need to have a central build-and-test server and a repo that is treated as the central repo for the developers (in git, servers have no built-in roles). It has to be set up to run all the tests, whether they are unit tests, story tests (cucumber, etc), or what-have you. Now, the thing you have to know is the state of your local machine, and the state of the build server. When I say GREEN , I mean "builds and all tests pass."   When I say RED  I mean that something doesn't build or did not pass all the tests. The Rules The rules in precedence order are: GET TO GREEN.   Green to green ; anything else is obscene. You need to know that your code is good, and the server's code is good, and you can push your code to the server. "But wait", you might say, "there are states unaccounted for here. What about pushing green to red?" "But Tim!" you may cry, "my code isn...

TDD is a pretty simple system, as popularly described.  For an individual doing a kata or playing with some example code it is really just three steps. On card #44 of AgileInAFlash it looks like this: It's the right way to think about TDD, and the right way to get started. When you get to a real project in a team environment you have many other issues to consider.  In a modern team environment, with a DVCS, it looks more like this: Get the current code ( git pull , get clone , hg pull -u , whatever) Run all the tests and be sure they're all really green, to avoid blaming yourself for unrelated breakages. If there are no tests, write a trivial failing test (" assertTrue(false) ") to prove your testing setup (ide, scripts, makefiles) really work. Then delete the trivial test. Write one "real" red test. INSIST ON RED. Write code to turn it green. Local commit "save your game" Refactor (or intentionally choose not to). Check to...