From Legacy To Agility: Introducing Unit Tests

• Presenters: Sven Gorts & Hans Keppens
• Type: Interactive presentation
• Duration: 60 minutes
• Audience: apprentice and journeyman developers

Objectives

Despite the popularity of unit testing frameworks many software projects still don't have a test suite. For a team that wants to adopt agile development practices the lack of comprehensive test suite is often a serious impediment. Writing unit tests for existing code is often hard and many developers find themselves struggling getting their existing code under test. With our session "Introducing Unit Tests" we want to reach out to developers that experience such difficulties. By demonstrating and discussing techniques to improve the testability of the code we hope give these developers fresh ideas and encourage them to continue their unit testing efforts.

Abstract

• Unit Testing
  • What Are Unit Tests
  • Why We Want Unit Test
  • What Makes A Good Unit Testwill only be a quick refresh, we assume the audience knows about unit tests
• Our First Test
  • Example: Writing The First Test (Actually a little story)in contrast to happy TDD examples things will go wrong here
• Testing Issues
  • Testing Difficulties
  • Lowering The Threshold
• Case Study: Critical Dependencies
  • Example: Bringing Critical Dependencies Under Testtoy example that stands in for native or shell-calls / external hardware / databases
• Common Idioms / Discussionexamples and ideas which we hope will trigger some discussion. In case the audience turns out to be responsive we’ll shorten this part of the presentation in favor of a more interactive presentation

Benefits of attending

By attending these session, participants: are introduced to common difficulties for bringing existing code under test; will learn how making code testable comes down to managing the critical dependencies; will have seen some step-by-step refactoring walkthroughs of some techniques.

What will the organisers learn

We want to learn more about the technical difficulties developers experience during the transition to more agile developers. In particular we want to find out what the typical stumbling blocks related to refactoring and unit testing are and try to help interested people getting started.

Session Outline

The session will be an alternation of lecture and examples.

• ± 20 minutes lecture
• ± 25 minutes examples
• ± 15 minutes discussion

Outputs

Developers are encouraged to pick up or continue unit testing, in their effort of making their environment more agile.

History

• Sven and Hans presented a session on Refactoring during an 'Agile Development and Testing day', May 2005 in Mechelen.
• Sven presented a session on Refactoring Thumbnails during the Benelux XP day 2004 in Mechelen.
• Both gave technical presentations for fellow colleagues on many occassions.