Test Driven Development presentation

Question

I need a short presentation on TDD to show at a company meeting. It need to be a on-line talk and not longer than 35 minutes. Do you have any recommendations?

Answer 1

I have been looking for a video like that myself.

The best I could come up is Steve Freeman On TDD: How Do We Know When We’re Done?, but sadly it is significantly longer than 35 minutes.

Answer 2

I'd recommend Roy Osherove's understanding Test Driven Development. At just over an hour, it's slightly longer than what you were asking for, but is a great introduction nonetheless.

I also recommend Roy's other videos too, his blog, ISerializable and his book, the art of unit testing.

Answer 3

Also ckeck out this blog post: Testing and Testable Code Presentation

Answer 4

If you're intending on presenting it yourself, the best recommendation I can give is: Don't just use heaps of text on PowerPoint slides. People honestly won't remember much in a presentation like that. And if they do remember something, chances are no-one will actually try it. Instead, try something more creative:

If your target audience has technical knowledge, I would plan a bit of code to write, and write it in front of them so they can see you actually doing it. Sure, outline the benefits, but show them - don't just tell people about them.

And if your target audience doesn't have technical knowledge, I'd question why you're giving a presentation on TDD ;-)

Answer 5

Concentrate on benefits of TDD. Be honest that doing TDD takes longer to write code at the beginning but company / developers will save time is on mantainess. Even TDD is not about testing ask your audience how much are they willing to pay for quality. Also tell them that testing breeds confidence and if you write tests before you write your code, you end up writing better code.

I would concentrate that TDD is not about testing it's about development. What I mean is that TDD is not a technique to verify code it's a development technique.

Show five steps of TDD.

1. Write Test.
2. See test fail.
3. Write code to make test pass
4. Run Test
5. Refactor.

Answer 6

Youtube has a lot of short (and long) videos. There are even language-specific ones. I suggest you take a look and pick the one the looks best for your company presentation.

Answer 7

I made a presentation about TDD a year ago using the "A TRIP" acronym and had some breaks with very quick hands-on with Eclipse (programming in Java). It worked out well in a closed group session (I believe it took me 30 minutes to go through it all without the hands-on material). However if you need to make it 30 minutes you may need to cut some things.

You shouldn't try to present too much since TDD tangents into so many other subjects which is better left to the viewer to look up him/herself, as long as you can give links to resources on the web.