Monday 9 February 2015

TDD – My experience

Reading this excellent post at ’The Codeless Code’ I came to think of my own experience with Test Driven Development (TDD): http://thecodelesscode.com/case/44
 
My first take on Test Driven Development was many years ago, before agile had really made an impact. We faced the following challenges:
  • Customer wanted shorter development cycles.
  • Development was outsourced.
  • Test resources was scarce and had no coding skills.
  • Offshore resources had little business domain knowledge.
 
In order to address especially the last two bullets it became evident that we had to change strategy, and focus on implementing a process that supported the offshore development team and enabled the onshore resources to assist the offshore team though reviews and guidance.
 
TDD was introduced as part of the low level specification done by the offshore team. One of the sections in the specification was dealing with the unit test cases that had to be written in order to cover the functionality detailed in the spec.
 
Another challenge was that the offshoring happened fast, and we had little time to train the team. That meant that we had to come up with ways of “testing” the team’s understanding before countless hours was used coding a solution. We found that testing the solution late in the development cycle often proved too late to counter misunderstandings. This meant that we came up with this very simple procedure for handing over the development assignment to the offshore team:
 
Walkthrough of business requirements and related high level specification, to empower the offshore team to take up development. Offshore team did low-level detailed specifications on solution including test cases, and these was sent for review. Testers reviewed test cases, architects reviewed the solution, and sr. developers reviewed the pseudo code for completeness and capability with current solution. The interesting thing was that it almost always proved to be the test cases that gave the pointers on whether or not the proposed solution was in line with expectations.
 
Once low-level design was approved the test cases was implemented – Once done they were checked in and added to system codebase, and baselined as part of the delivery. After development of the actual solution all test cases was part of the regression test suite, meaning that we soon had lots of automated test on the project leaving us with a high level of code coverage.
 
The real challenge of introducing TDD was to shape the organization to facilitate this new way of working, and enforcing the procedures. There was quite a stir in the onshore organization, not only did they have to embrace the new offshore colleagues, they also had to hand over some of their assignments to them. At first the offshore colleagues were put off by the constant review and scrutiny of their code – Little code could be written before passing a series of quality gates. These gates was not in any of the standard development processes, meaning that they were sailing uncharted waters. This meant that there was a lot of explaining and discussion up front before the TDD approach could be attempted.
 
Biggest impact was on the testers – they had to abandon trivial functional testing, as this responsibility now rested on the shoulders of the developers. This was hard, as they were used to doing test cases one to one on the functional requirements. Their scope was now expanding to a compiling test results of TDD into test coverage reporting, and then doing testing in areas that looked a little weak. On top of this, they were now in charge of the factory acceptance, calling for testing that was focused on the system as a whole, and challenging their business domain knowledge far more than they were used to.
 
Happy testing!
 
/Nicolai
 
PS. MSDN has a very nice guide for those wanting to pursue TDD:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730844(v=vs.80).aspx
 

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