[searls]

This was indeed my motivation for writing the post. I think the next step to take if you agree with my premise is that we need to come together with ideas for how to best teach TDD to beginners/novices. Exercises that promote these concepts, lines of reasoning to take, tools to get people started without any unnecessary cognitive overhead, etc.

I agree that teaching TDD exactly how I do it today can be a bit overwhelming from a tooling perspective currently, but conceptually I think visualizing it as a reductionist exercise with a tree graph of units is pretty simple.

[bphogan]

One thing I do with my beginning programming students (since their programs are tiny) is make them write out "test plans" on paper before they can write their program code.

They have to write the inputs and then the expected results.

It gets them thinking about the concept of using tests as part of the design practice.

Later, I give them the unit tests and they have to write the code. This is usually a rewritten version of a previous program so they see the text-based test plans in action as unit tests.

Then I might give them the empty test and an empty implementation, asking them to fill in the test first, then the implementation.

Finally I ask for a completely new feature, and they have to figure out how to write the test. And I ask them to go about it with a test plan.

After a few semesters of this, I think I'm ready to say that this is successful for getting the "beginners" there.

It doesn't address everything, but I think it's a good start.