Hi
I hope this is not OT. I’m training my replacement at work to do BDD
Rails development. He’s done a CS/maths degree but has no
professional programming experience, so he’s never NOT done a project
without BDD. In a way I am jealous of his unspoilt situation
I’ve gone about things this way:
- first teach him some Ruby (he did mainly Java at uni)
- then let him write a small program (to a rough description I
came up with) in Ruby however he wants - then teach him how to do BDD-driven OO
- then let him re-write the sample app in a BDD way.
The app loads a YAML file that lists some URLs, fetches the pages off
the interweb, extracts some data from the body of the spec, and
outputs it to XML. He’s picking stuff up quick - he wrote it in
about 1 1/2 days despite only learning Ruby last week.
I’ve gone through a really simple BDD example with him that is quite
similar to part of the bigger app - he seems to follow the syntax of
RSpec and flexmock, understands the concepts of full and partial
mocks, etc. But I’ve left him to rewrite his app along the same
lines, and it’s like there is a void. Where before he just kept
working at little bits until the output built up, now he’s got the
ability to isolate simple bits of code and develop/test them (eg
formatting a tag from a URL), he’s taking longer. He seems to
be struggling to pick isolated pieces of functionality out of the
bigger problem.
One thing I have done for him is write a functional test - one that
runs the whole app “WebParse.run(infile, outfile)” black-box style,
and compares the output in “outfile” to the output of his existing
app (which we’ve decided between us is correct and suitable as a
reference). I’m not sure if this has helped or confused the issue.
Clearly there is something important I am not explaining, something I
take for granted. Does anyone have any ideas what? I was hoping
someone else here has been through the experience of teaching BDD
(RSpec or otherwise) from scratch and may be able to point me in the
right direction.
Thanks for any advice
Ashley
PS I haven’t told him to subscribe to this list yet, so I’m safe to
talk about him for a bit :o)
–
blog @ http://aviewfromafar.net/
linked-in @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleymoran
currently @ work