Course: TDD for Embedded C

Date entered: 2018-10-03 19:28:39 UTC

Course rating: Excellent

Most useful learnings: I came in with an appreciation for TDD, but I appreciated the discussion of tooling for automating System/Acceptance testing via Cucumber/Fitnesse.

Concepts v exercises: Good balance

Presentation v discussion: Good balance

Course improvements: I would have really liked if there was some instructor provided "Legacy" code that we could use to get a unit testing environment up and running on our individual PC's. I think this would remove a significant hurdle for attendees to bring a successful TDD practice back to their professional work. Perhaps this is more covered in a different course though?

Exercise rating: Excellent

Exercise improvements: I'm not sure they can actually. I really liked the coding dojo setup. I think providing the unit test breadcrumbs were really well done.

Instructor comments: James is knowledgeable of the realities and pressures on embedded developers that cause projects to accumulate technical debt. His sympathetic approach

Better prepared: Bring it on!

Start tomorrow: I will be starting to deploy a unit test framework tomorrow. Though I will likely select Ceedling/Unity because Ruby/Rake has a native windows installer and I won't have to deal with Cygwin/mingw to meet most unit testing frameworks dependencies on make. However, I think it will take a longer time for me to convince my coworkers that we should slow down to speed up.

Challenges to applying: My organization has deployed Agile methods from the management side down, with the typical results of developer suspicion and distrust. In some of their minds, TDD is a symptom of Agile and causes extra work that brings them no benefit. I hope to lead by example and show that TDD provides extreme, but delayed, value to developers and that can trickle up to the business as it becomes easier to pay off technical debt.

Other comments:

Legacy code workshop: No

Recommend to others: Yes

Quote permission: Yes