Monday, April 14, 2008

Martin Fowler and CDT

Martin Fowler of Test-Driven Development and Agile Manifesto fame wrote on his blog this weekend about context-driven testing and how it relates to himself. He goes on to say that he doesn't know a similar thread regarding software developers in general and that there is an opportunity to help define this for the future.

I find it interesting that he sees this in himself at the same time I do. I'm of the TDD/Agile school and I'm learning how to become more context-driven. I believe there is a dovetail here and that in order to help define it, there needs to some thought into software development schools of thought.

My first thought on that school is more of an analogy: You can't take a C driver developer and move them into a BPEL Java Web Services environment overnight, you need some mentoring and retraining to make this transition effective. Same with testing, different schools need the same level of retrain/rethink in order to move in to other schools. I'm on my way now to the CDT world, but still bringing my TDD world with me.

Interesting post, and if you don't know who Martin Fowler is, you should find out! I love the tools his company makes and I'm constantly using them in my everyday testing world.