Yes, this is just an echo post… but I found it so exciting that I just had to write about it. 

I’m a member of the Agile Sweden mailing list, and today an interesting electronic letter arrived. There’s going to be an agile conference in Stockholm in the beginning of June, called Agila Sverige. It’s inspired by the norwegian initiative Smidig 2007, which focused on lightning talks (a presentation being at most 10 minutes long) and open space discussions. It’s also super cheap, hopefully I can go.

I recommend you to watch one of the lightning talks from Smidig last year, given by the swedish Niclas Nilsson of factor10 on the meaning of words when you’re dealing with TDD/BDD. You can find more videos at the Smidig site, and they’re all released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

I’ve started looking at Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and more specifically RSpec for Ruby. BDD is an evolution of Test-Driven Development (TDD) which aims to make developers look at it from another perspective and not regard it as testing in a sense. So it’s more of a new way of expressing your intent rather than an entirely new approach to tests (or specs as the BDD community calls it).

You divide your code into small pieces of behavior, rather than the more abstract term units and write what it should do.

Here are two examples of the difference:

Edit: I tried pasting some code I’d written here, but the wordpress editor sucks when it comes to formatting code. But you can find great examples here and here.

I just watched a video where Dave Astels (one of the guys behind RSpec) explains why you should take a look at BDD if you’re into TDD. To quote him: “Behaviour Driven Development is what you were doing already if you were doing Test Driven Development very well”. You can also read his PDF A new look at test-driven development (8 pages) where he explains his views and why too few people “really understand what it’s really about. That means that many people who practice TDD are not getting the full benefit from it”.

Oh yeah, my Ruby skills are progressing much slower than I’d like. But I’ve found a cool little text that explains how the author learned Ruby through unit tests. That’s pretty cool, and sound just as backwards-yet-making-a-hell-of-a-lot-of-sense as test-driven development. Using the language to learn the language, fun-kee!

So I’m currently reading a little in Programming Ruby and testing my way through the framework. Thank God/Buddha/Vishnu etc. that I don’t have a PC at home (just a white apple), so it’s much more difficult for me to revert to ASP.NET when the new language becomes too complicated.