Growing up I always enjoyed a good game of Othello. The rules of the game are very simple, but it takes a lot of work to become really good at Othello. There is a great tagline used to describe this game; “A Minute to Learn...A Lifetime to Master”.
The same can be said about Test Driven Development. In fact, when NimblePros hires interns in the summer, we go to recruiting events and set up laptops for people to write some code using TDD. When there are no students in the room, we’re the ones working on the code. Even our seasoned developers need to practice using TDD or we’ll never become better at using it.
The great part about this is that you don’t need any experience with TDD in order to sit down and start. You don’t want to sit down and start using TDD on legacy code, but simpler problems are a great way to get started.
We like doing these exercises as it allows us to not only see who can write code, but also who is willing to take the leap and try new things. This is one of our self-selecting techniques of evaluating people. Would you hire an employee not willing to go out on a limb and try something new? I wouldn’t.
I have two points to make: it’s easy to get started with TDD and if you don’t practice it you’ll never master it.
Sure, I can grab students from a college who may have only heard of unit testing in a class and have never really implemented it, but will those students ever get good at TDD. I think that they will if they work hard and actually use TDD. You have to practice it though. TDD will slow you down at first, which is why you need to practice it.
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