testdriven.com Wrangling quality out of chaos

APress has posted three beta chapters from Test-Driven Development: A J2EE Example, for readers to provide feedback to the authors.Beta chapters available:

Introduction to Test Driven Development
Thomas Hammell introduces the theory of Test Driven Development (TDD) and explains its fundamental concepts and benefits. TDD is more than a nice idea. It is a proven methodology that can be used to simplify the development environment and help developers produce better software. Of course some things that sound good in theory are hard to put to practice. TDD is not that hard to put into practice but it does take some new knowledge and experience to properly implement.

Getting Started
This chapter introduces the tools needed to effectively perform TDD. It also introduces the requirements for the Football Pool application that will be used throughout the rest of the book. As described in the beginning of this chapter, it is important to take the time to set up your development environment to make it easy to create software. There are enough problems producing good software; so, you don’t want your development environment to get in the way.

Unit Testing: The Foundation of Test-Driven Development
In this chapter, Hammell puts the theory of chapter 1 and the tools discussed in chapter 2 into practice. He starts out by developing a simple unit test that should help you write the code for a base class belonging to the Football Pool application. This example show us how the JUnit testing framework works, and allows you to go through the test->code->build cycle the TDD way. Later in this chapter, Hammell illustrates how to use JUnit’s TestSuite to run a set of tests, as well as shows how Ant can be used to make the tests easier to run. Finally, this chapter shows how to develop around dependent classes.

The chapters come in both HTML and PDF formats.