Property-Based TDD at XP Day London 2012

Keith Braithwaite and I ran the Property-Based TDD As If You Meant It exercise as a workshop at XP Day London 2012.

I'd hoped that everyone in the session would have previously experienced Keith's original TDD As If You Meant It workshop, so we could focus on the different ways that Example-Based and Property-Based Testing affected how we test-drive code. On the day only about half of the attendees had. This wasn't too bad. We paired those who hadn't with those who had and there was enough people for everyone to use a language they preferred, or at least were fluent in.

The languages used were, in order of popularity, Ruby, Python, C#, Clojure, Java. I expect that Python was so high up the list because they knew they could use my QuickCheck library (now called factcheck) and get me to help them get up to speed with it. If so, that tactic worked. Unfortunately, nobody chose to do the exercise in Haskell or ML.

The participants carried on with the exercise further than I did but ran into the much the same problems.

At the end of the session we spent a few minutes gathering thoughts and feedback (unfortunately we overran the time slot and so we didn't have as much discussion as I'd have liked). The following is my recollection of what people found, based on the rough notes I recorded on a flip chart.

Copyright © 2012 Nat Pryce. Posted 2012-12-10. Share it.