Test Driven Development with Ruby: Part 1 - A Simple Example

Test Driven Development (TDD) is something that many people talk about but few actually do. A common misconception is that TDD is about writing acceptance tests before developing the code. It’s really more than automated acceptance tests … it’s about using unit tests to drive the development process.

This series of screencasts (3 in total) are intended to be a very simple demonstration of TDD. In order to achieve that author have left out a lot of complexity that you’d ordinarily encounter in software development. In particular the following items are noticeably absent from the screencast:

• Practical value. The class that author build is intentionally very, very simple and as a result has little (if any) practical value.
• Exceptions and exception handling. Author have not addressed exceptions as part of this series of screencasts. He intend to do some work with exceptions in my next screencasts.
• Database connectivity and related issues. He haven’t used a database as part of my example, and so database interactions are totally absent.
• Mocks, httpUnits or other more advanced testing frameworks. There is clearly fertile ground for further work!

But, anyways, this screencast would be great introduction for all developers who are interested in TDD.