Review the fundamentals

As a distributed, international team, we have a lot of best practices in place which we follow to make sure the applications we build deliver the best business value. Technical checks are part of that process: we practice Test Driven Development, use CI servers, and use pull requests to perform code reviews. All of this contributes to having clean code bases that can grow with clients’ needs.

That’s why I was recently invited to give a small presentation about TDD at the Bogota Ruby Meetup. Since most of the audience was new to Test Driven Development, I decided to talk about the fundamentals and prepared a small exercise to give the atendees the opportunity to get their hands on some of the concepts I presented.

Since the time span for the talk and subsequent workshop was very limited, we were not able to go into how to write good unit tests. That is an important and really interesting topic. Doing TDD the wrong way can be as harmful as not doing TDD at all; I hope that’s a topic I can cover in a future talk. In the meanwhile, if you’re interested in learning more about it, you can watch Sandi Metz’s talk The Magic Tricks of Testing which she recently gave at RailsConf.

If you are interested, you can find the slides for the presentation here.