Development method.

[Robert B]

Dear sir/madam,

I am an SE student at the university of Amsterdam.
At the moment I am working on my graduate thesis, for this thesis i
try to investigate the effect of Test-Driven Development on the
evolution of logical designs in software projects.
I do this by creating several evolution matrices and look for several
patterns.
The evolution matrix is a concept of Michele Lanza.

I was wondering if you could possibly give a short description about
the way DimDwarf was/is developed. For example is it developed in a
TDD style manner? This would be very much appreciated.

Kind regards,

Robert Baarda.

[Esko Luontola]

Dimdwarf is developed fully using TDD. Originally it used a bottom-up TDD style, but since 2010 it has used a top-down TDD style driven by end-to-end tests [1] as advocated in the GOOS book (though I don't use mocks much). I've also screencasted some of Dimdwarf's development [2] so there you can see in more detail how it has been developed.

For the past year I've focused on another project, a test runner called Jumi [3], so I haven't worked on Dimdwarf lately. Jumi is also 100% done with TDD and I've screencasted _all_ of its development, so that might interest you. Actually one of my ideas in screencasting Jumi's development was to provide some research material for anyone who's interested in it (I have some researcher friends at the University of Helsinki).

[1] http://blog.orfjackal.net/2010/07/design-for-integrability.html

[2] http://www.orfjackal.net/lets-code

[3] http://jumi.fi/

[Rb]

Dear mr. Luontola,

Thanks for your reply.

The screencasts of jumi sounds very interesting from a research perspective, one of the validation risks in using open-source projects is that there is no sight on how development was actually done. That is also one of the reasons why I've mailed you. Screencasting the entire development of a project does give that insight, so I will definitely look into that later this week.

Although I have a small pile of TDD books lying around, the GOOS book is a new one for me. Seems interesting enough to take a closer look at.

Kind regards,

Robert Baarda.