Kognitive Jelly

A week or so ago I downloaded the peepcode screencast on Test First Development. It was the first really clear example on Test Driven Development I’d seen and it helped clear up a lot of questions I’d had about it.

I was introduced to the idea of writing code based tests when I started learning about Ruby on Rails. When learning PHP (or any other language for that matter) it was not something mentioned in any of the literature I had encountered. But as Rails takes an “agile” approach to things, writing tests are an expected part of development.

Shortly after beginning my exploration of Rails I was hanging out in the #railsonrails IRC channel and Luke Redpath was talking about Behavior Driven Development (BDD) a variation of Test Driven Development (TDD). I was totally lost but wanted more information. He suggested reading Kent Beck’s book “Test Driven Development By Example” first and get familiar with that before trying to wrap my head around BDD. I promptly added it to my Amazon Wishlist and there it stayed until today. After watching that peepcode episode, I decided that I would finally plunk down for a copy of the book and today it arrived in the mail.

As the title suggests, this is my first book specifically about Agile Methodologies. While the Agile Web Development with Rails book is technically an Agile book it is more about the Rails framework than evangelizing and explaining any specific processes or philosophies. I’m looking forward to exploring the world of writing automated tests for my code prior to doing any sort of development. Hopefully it is as helpful as I expect it to be.