I haven't posted in a while, and thought I would catch everyone up with what I am doing.  I have been on a pretty deep exploration of Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), and Domain-Driven Design (DDD).  That is a lot of 3 letter acronyms.

Why all of this at once you may ask?  Well, for me, I feel that a lot of this is all intertwined, and should be explored together.  TDD and BDD are so close that it is just your thought processes when you approach the testing that makes them different (from here on, I will just refer to both as TDD).  DDD goes hand in hand with testing.  Testing your domain model is important in order to effectively refactor when necessary.  Check out this video of Dave Astels giving a talk to Google employees about BDD.

It’s funny that it took me shifting away from everyday development in order to free my mind enough to look at the bigger picture of software development.  Sure, I could always handle any problem passed on to me because I felt comfortable with my technical skills to do so.  The problem was I never truly ‘designed’ my software well.  That was hard for me to admit for awhile, but I have since seen where I have been and where I want to go.  Most of this thought process came from the fact that I wasn’t ‘in the trenches’ everyday, doing the same thing over and over.

I got on this track of thinking by reading the writings of some very smart people on the subjects.  I found Jeremy Millers blog which totally enlightened me on TDD.  His blog is hosted on the CodeBetter.Com site which contains many other blogs that provide some great value as well.   Martin Fowler is another author whose work has been a great resource.  I can’t believe it took me so long to read Martin Fowlers work, but once I have, I can’t get enough.  Last up, I have been reading a book called “Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns With Examples in C# and .NET” written by Jimmy Nilsson.  I am not even half way through the book, but so far I really like it.

So, that is where I am at right now.  I am going to finish up the book, do a small project to solidify the concepts, and start integrating the knowledge learned into future projects.  I will post any worth while updates on my progress here as I go on.

Brian Russell