TDD is born

Today is a good day to start

Reading Gary Bernhardt’s post TDD, Straw Men, and Rhetoric you can find this very insightful paragraph:

TDD is useful and test isolation is useful, but they both involve making trade-offs. Unfortunately, doing them 100% of the time seems to be the best way to learn what those trade-offs are, and that can temporarily lead beginners toward extremism. TDD and isolation both break down in some situations, and learning to detect those situations in advance takes a lot of time. This is true of advanced techniques in any discipline, programming or otherwise.

So yes, TDD is an advanced technique and it can take years before you can be really good at it.

So why don’t you start today and try it out?

Resistance is your enemy, but if you are up to the challenge, beware of the following enemies:

• Ignorance : If you feel uncomfortable, that’s ok. Remember when you learn how to drive? Before blaming what you don’t know, research, ask and try again.
• Laziness : You will be slower at first, but keep on it and you will gain speed. When learning to play guitar, you didn’t played a full song on you first day, you have to keep on it and work hard.
• Arrogance: We all can fall in the trap of thinking we have all the answers or how could it be necessary to take such small steps if we have X years of experience, but it’s necessary to protect you from yourself too.

Time to practice.