Richard Wells

New to the TDD approach of coding, I felt supported in getting to know the ideas behind TDD and how to use it in code. The complexity gradually increased with every next lesson. This worked fine for me. It disheartens me when I loss the reasoning behind the lecture content. That was absent in this course. What would have made the course excellent for me would have been using the TDD principles fully in the Supermarkt Checkout Kata. I can understand that at some point some progress in the course is needed. On the other hand: using the RED, GREEN, REFACTOR cycle strictly could have perfectly been shown within the class methods of the Checkout class for calculating and using the product discounts. During the course, the code for that was passed in rather quick with little interaction. It is code that is easy gets an error due to the various if-then cases. TDD is promoted as just the way of working that helps finding and preventing errors in the code. Also clear, comprehensable named tests are promoted as documentation on the working and intention of the code. In addition to that, later on in the course during the part of the use of the Mock framework the Checkout Kata could be expanded with reading in the items data from file. Showing how it is first tested with Mock and MagicMock and than finally really implementing the reading of the items data. To me that would have been a course flow that would have given me an even stronger understanding and knowledge on TDD.
- Review by Geert-Jan van der Wolf on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development in Python