The invitation to speak at XP Day Germany 2016 said I might be a good fit because I’m “trying to combine the ‘ancient wisdom’ of TDD with more recent approaches and languages.” My immediate reaction was “Is TDD ancient?”. And some time afterwards “Hey! Does that mean I am ancient?!?”
I have been learning TDD since 2001. That’s over 70 Internet years (at least, according to Eric Reis). Along the way, I’ve collaborated with many people in London and around the world, written libraries and tools, published academic papers, taught courses, written a book with Steve Freeman, … and never stopped finding new insights into what “test-driven” can mean in software development.
This talk will describe how I apply TDD on the systems I build today, and relate what we do to the ideas of thinkers that have inspired and informed me – both modern and ancient, but all certainly more wise!
Nat Pryce is a co-author of Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests. An early adopter of XP, he has written or contributed to several open source libraries and tools that support TDD and was one of the founding organizers of the London XP Day conference. He works programmer, architect, trainer, and consultant in a variety of industries, including e-commerce, media, telecoms, finance, retail and marketing communications. He has delivered business-critical systems that range from embedded devices to large compute farms supporting global business.