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Hard Skills

Review of “Learn TDD in 24 hours” on Udemy [2018]

What is Test-Driven Development (TDD)?

Test-driven development is all about writing code that you trust, maintainable, and you won’t call it legacy code straight out of the box. It means you write the test first and then you start to write code. In contrast with common beliefs, you save time with this technique because you have to write the tests once and it will test your production code as many times you want. You will rarely have to test your code manually again. You will see examples for this in the course I review for you below.

What is the course like?

The first impression as you start to watch the course is: why is the teacher is all the time in the frame. You can see that this is one of his first courses. He is a little bit shy at the beginning and probably his heart is in his mouth, but he picks up the speed and courage quite quickly. You wouldn’t tell but he is a Ph.D. student at that time in software testing.

He soon reveals a really simple piece of code that shows quickly why is testing so important and how easy it is to write code that would fail in real-life scenarios: in production. The logic looks good, the results are looking good, but hey, there is that one case when our code fails. And it is all happening in the first 10 minutes.

Do you know what these steps are?

  1. Scenario

  2. Action

  3. Validation

If not I recommend you read through this review and watch the course on Udemy.

Reviewed course link:

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[If you get this course through my affiliate I will get a commission. It won’t affect the original price you pay for this course.]

He shows the test naming conventions for the jUnit. After that (and it is a really good point) he shows that his test could run in only 0.033 seconds. I bet it is a little bit quicker than a human manual test 🙂

After that there are questions you will know the answer for like:

  1. What is a happy path?

  2. What is the sad path?

  3. How to find cases to test the same logic from many aspects.

  4. Naming conventions

  5. Testing rules

  6. Design Patterns: You will see many examples with Design Patterns that are useful in everyday scenarios.

Useful Questions to answer:

  1. Why did I choose this course to watch?

    1. I chose this course to watch because it was recommended by my colleagues.

    2. I see every day the value of Test Driven Development and the pain when the code lacks proper tests.

    3. With automated tests, you can save your code from becoming tomorrow’s legacy code. Keeping your code always fresh and documented is like having food that can be consumed any time in the future and find it fresh and tasty. Yummy.

  2. The programming language used for this course: Java

  3. What test framework is in use?

    1. Starts with simple System.out.printline

    2. changes the simple examples to jUnit with a nice touch to understand the essence of test case writing.

  4. Whit IDE (Integrated Development Environment) does it use?

    Eclipse

  5. Can the gained knowledge be used for other technologies: Yes it can. The mindset that is important not the tools that he uses. (Although for Java he used rally convincing tools.)

  6. Who should watch this course? With what experience level?

    Course Level: Beginner. This is for those who never wrote tests before or still learning how to write code.

  7. Did it meet my expectations / Would I recommend it?

    If I would be in my Junior years this course would be a really great first step toward learning Test Driven Development. If you never worked with TDD before I recommend this course because it sums up the main features of TDD and you will get a good understanding of it et the end of the course. Although the teacher is Brasilian and his English is a bit slow, you can solve it by speeding up the video a bit. The teacher’s Ph.D. on the topic gave me confidence that he knows what he is talking about, so it met my expectations. Good work.

  8. Can I ask questions before I commit my time to this course, just to be sure?

    Of course, you can. That is why I am here. To answer useful questions.

I hope you found this review useful. If you liked my review and watched this course I would highly appreciate it if you would leave some feedback to know I am doing a great job that helps you, my reader.

By Botond Bertalan

I love programming and architecting code that solves real business problems and gives value for the end-user.

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