[TIP] A quick guide to testing (for the khmer project)

[C. Titus Brown]

I teach undergrads, and they are often starting with no version control,
little Python, highly variable programming experience, and no automated
testing; it's a complete disaster.  If I had 'em for two terms I could
do more.

I also work to educate scientists, and while they take to testing like ducks
to water (*slight exaggeration) like many inexperienced programmers the
combination of VCS, Python, and automated testing sinks them well before
they get to TDD.

tl; dr? I have lots of experience and am choosing to spend my time on other
things than teaching TDD :)

--titus

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 03:03:41PM +0000, Marcin Tustin wrote:
> What have you found is the difficulty in teaching it? The only problems I have found in teaching it are that people are unwilling to try it at all. Once they try it, they become comfortable with it very quickly.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: C. Titus Brown [mailto:ctb at msu.edu] 
> Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 11:03 AM
> To: Marcin Tustin
> Cc: tip at lists.idyll.org
> Subject: Re: [TIP] A quick guide to testing (for the khmer project)
> 
> Yes, I know how TDD works, but I don't use it on my projects and I've found that it is very difficult to teach.  YMMV but there you are :).
> 
> best,
> --titus
> 
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 03:00:01PM +0000, Marcin Tustin wrote:
> > This encodes the code first, write tests afterward approach to development. It's bad because it's *hard*. It's hard to come up with good test cases post hoc, because there's a lot of analysis to do (which is made easier when you write the code, because you're already thinking of those things), and because code not written to be tested is more difficult to test. TDD solves these problems by merging the development and testing activities into one step.
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: testing-in-python-bounces at lists.idyll.org 
> > [mailto:testing-in-python-bounces at lists.idyll.org] On Behalf Of C. 
> > Titus Brown
> > Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 10:12 AM
> > To: tip at lists.idyll.org
> > Subject: [TIP] A quick guide to testing (for the khmer project)
> > 
> > http://khmer.readthedocs.org/en/docs-hackathon/dev/a-quick-guide-to-te
> > sting.html
> > 
> > comments, thoughts?
> > _______________________________________________
> > testing-in-python mailing list
> > testing-in-python at lists.idyll.org
> > http://lists.idyll.org/listinfo/testing-in-python
> 
> --
> C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu

-- 
C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu