Test Drive

Question

In which book would you advise you to learn test-based development? Preferably linguistic agnostic.

Answer 1

• Test-based development, following the example
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
• Extreme Programming: Embrace The Change

Answer 2

Growing object-oriented software based on Addison-Wesley benchmarking concerns mocking frameworks, notably JMock and Hamcrest.

From the description of the book:

Steve Freeman and Nat Price describe the processes they use, the design principles that they strive for, and some tools that help them do their job. In an advanced, well-developed example, you will learn how TDD works at several levels, using tests to control functions and the object-oriented structure of the code, and also using Mock Objects to detect and subsequently describe the relationships between objects. In addition, the book systematically addresses the challenges that development teams face with TDD — from integrating TDD into your processes to testing your most complex functions.

EDIT: I am now reading Work Effectively with Michael Feathers Legacy Code , which is pretty good. From the description of the book:

• Understanding the software change mechanism: adding features,
  error correction, design improvement, performance optimization
• Getting obsolete code in a test harness
• Writing tests to protect you from new problems
• This book also includes a catalog of twenty-four dependency-breaking methods that will help you work with program elements in isolation and make safer changes.

I already read it, this is one of the best programming books I've ever read (I personally think it should be called "Refactoring to Testability" - it describes the processes that make your code testable). Because the code under test is good code.

Answer 3

For me, this is the best:

• Development through testing: the example of Kent Beck

Answer 4

A fairly recent reasonably written book, The Art of Unit Testing . I am surprised that was not mentioned here.

Answer 5

Astels' book is a good introduction, Beck's book is good at basic concepts, Lasse Koskel has an innovation (Test Driven: TDD and Acceptance TDD for Java developers) . Osherov’s book , he said, is about unit testing, not TDD. I am not sure that the TDD Pragmatists book has become as old as their original book.

In most cases, this is Java or C #, but you have to figure it out yourself.

Answer 6

I am a big fan of almost anything from Pragmatic Bookshelf , but these two really helped me get to the point:

Pragmatic programmer: from Journeyman to Master . It is very good. I would recommend it to any developer.

Pragmatic module testing in C # with NUnit, 2nd Edition . Do not let the title scare you. The concepts are pretty linguistic, as well as C # examples.

Answer 7

Testing Developed by Dave Astels : A Practical Guide