Tag Archives: JUnit

Test Driven Development (TDD): Best Practices Using Java Examples

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In the previous article Test Driven Development (TDD): Example Walkthrough an example of TDD was given. It went from writing first test and its implementation to having a set of requirements fully tested and developed. Now it’s time to learn what the best TDD practices are. This article will be built on examples from the previous one.

Best practices are solutions to a set of problems under certain situations. Not following them would make us “reinvent the wheel” and struggle with the same problems already solved by others. On the other hand, best practices should not be followed blindly. They should be tried out. With an informed decision at hand, they can be adopted as they are, modified to serve better specific situation or fully discarded.

Some of the best practices described here are inherited from other sets of practices and used when doing TDD. For example, most (if not all) unit testing practices should be used when doing TDD.
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Test Driven Development (TDD): Example Walkthrough

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medium_5927476303Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: first the developer writes an (initially failing) automated test case that defines a desired improvement or new function, then produces the minimum amount of code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards.

The following sequence of steps is generally followed:

  • Add a test
  • Run all tests and see if the new one fails
  • Write some code
  • Run tests
  • Refactor code
  • Repeat

There’s a plenty of articles written on TDD and Wikipedia is always a good start. This article will focus on the actual test and implementation using variation of one of the Roy Osherove Katas. Do not click the link until you’re finished with this article. This excercise is best done when not all requirements are known in advance.

Below you will find the test code related to each requirement and afterwards the actual implementation. Try to read only one requirement, write the tests and the implementation yourself and compare it with the results from this article. Remember that there are many different ways to write tests and implementation. This article is only one out of many possible solutions.

Let’s start!
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