TDD Conference 2021 - Want More Value Faster? Take Many More Much Smaller Steps - GeePaw Hill

First International Test Driven Development took place on July 10th.

In this series, I will include every talk together with my notes and further reading.

Hopefully, a lot of readers will watch and rewatch the talks, as they are worth several reviews.

Let's continue...

Want More Value Faster? Take Many More Much Smaller Steps - GeePaw Hill

Bio

We all know and love GeePaw and his inimitable style of "Helping Geeks Produce for Over 40 Years."

TL;DR: Baby steps are the best way to go from one place to the next one.

Talk

My Personal notes

TDD is like cooking. We use too much rice and too little garlic.
Take many more (and) smaller steps to change faster.
Old demonstrations are ridiculous tiny compared with today's.
Single threaded construction
Target didn't change.
Today, we work on gigantic apps with changing requirements.
We should divide and conquer (decompose) more.
Take baby steps between activated states.
We should fix maximum duration to keep steps "baby" (< 1 hour).
The most efficient path is the one with smaller steps.
Even if some steps don't produce user value or diverge.
They just can't get worse.
The Walking Skeleton is the working app.
Software isn't plain geometry.
Changeability costs less than rework avoidance.
We seldom can go from one point to other in a straight line.
Problems in software are not polynomial. They get NP Hard.
During baby steps, we should not be interrupted. (or we will need to start over)
Programming is thinking. It is not related to typing.
on TDD we have automated consequence detection, fast context switching and executable documentation.
The worse bugs in the world are the ones you had no idea you just shipped.
We should maximize knowledge sharing to increase changeability.
The only requirement is for steps to be as small as possible.
TDD is not as simple as Red, Green, Refactor. It takes time to master.
We need to collaborate by mobbing, pairing and swarming.
They are not natural skills.

We live in a world of misconceptions of thinking knowing syntax is at the heart of the problems. Lots of people believe there's a technical solution to every problem and that it would be best for all of us to sit in dark rooms working quietly by ourselves.