TDD Is A Broken Practice • Dave Farley • GOTO 2025

We’re so pleased to having teamed up with Dave Farley, author of “Continuous Delivery” and frequent GOTO Conferences speaker, for a monthly video series featuring ideas about continuous delivery, DevOps, test-driven development, BDD, software engineering and software development in general. Find plenty more from Dave on his @ModernSoftwareEngineeringYT channel. Dave Farley - Continuous Delivery & DevOps Pioneer, Award-winning Author, Founder & Director of Continuous Delivery Ltd. RESOURCES Dave https://bsky.app/profile/davefarley77.bsky.social https://www.continuous-delivery.co.uk https://linkedin.com/in/dave-farley-a67927 https://twitter.com/davefarley77 http://www.davefarley.net Links https://x.com/kettanaito/status/1769643198962426000 https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/tdds-missing-skill-behavioral-composition ABSTRACT According to some people, TDD is a broken practice because it depends on perfect foreknowledge of what we are going to build. This is clearly a mistake, Test Driven Development certainly requires us to understand what we want our code to do before we write it, but if you don’t know that before you start, what are you writing code for? To learn TDD you need to adopt an incremental approach to solving problems and to software development it doesn’t matter if you are practising test driven development in Java, C#, Python or even COBOL, the idea is to design the outside view of your code by writing a test and only then worrying about the internal implementation. The kind of genius-level foresight that is assumed to be needed by non-TDDers is not what is needed a more exploratory approach of small steps leading to better designs is what we really need. In this episode, Dave Farley author of “Continuous Delivery” and “Modern Software Engineering” talks about common misunderstandings of TDD and gives some examples of how it really works, including examples from Kent Beck, who rediscovered TDD. CD TRAINING COURSES If you want to learn Continuous Delivery and DevOps skills, check out Dave Farley's courses https://bit.ly/DFTraining RECOMMENDED BOOKS & LINKS You can grab Dave Farley's new book 'Continuous Delivery Pipelines' here: https://leanpub.com/cd-pipelines David Farley • Modern Software Engineering • https://amzn.to/3GI468M Dave Farley & Jez Humble • Continuous Delivery • https://amzn.to/3ocIHwd Forsgren, Humble & Kim • Accelerate • https://amzn.to/367RI5o Gojko Adzic & David Evans • 50 Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories • https://leanpub.com/50quickideas https://bsky.app/profile/gotocon.com https://twitter.com/GOTOcon https://www.linkedin.com/company/goto- https://www.instagram.com/goto_con https://www.facebook.com/GOTOConferences #GOTOxDaveFarley #TDD #TestDrivenDevelopment #Testing #Programming #DaveFarley #GOTO #GOTOcon #ProgrammingTutorial #SoftwareEngineering #ModernSoftwareEngineering CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket at https://gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily. https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences/?sub_confirmation=1