Jay Wren speaks at Flint branch of GLUG.net

Jay Wren gave an excellent demonstration of Test Driven Development at the Flint branch of GLUG.net monthly meeting last night. We had nine members in attendance and everyone got a prize.

Jay is relatively new to speaking. I was very impressed by his personable, enthisiastic, and engaging style. He replied with well thought out answers to each question he was asked. He introduced Test Driven Development with a few slides and then dove into a live demo of NUnit. He asked the audience for sample requirements and used the non trivial task of developing a two way dictionary as his sample. Generally I dislike live coding samples because things go wrong. Jay showed his .net prowess and mastery of Coderush by quickly correcting all type os and errors.

I think Jay summarized test driven development with this statement "How do I use this vs. what do I need." When we code first we are creating what we need. When Jay codes tests first he is consuming his API and thus gains a new perspective on the API which leads to better design and usability.

Jay briefly gave a demo of NCoverExplorer and Coderush. I recently installed Coderush, and thanks to Jay's brief demo I started effectively learning it today. NCoverExplorer is a test analysis tool which shows executed lines, cover % how many times a particular method was called etc.

I was reading Jay's blog today which has some good entries.