Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests

by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce.
ISBN 978-0321503626

I'll cut straight to the chase: This is a great book! In fact I'd put it second, behind Test Driven Development by Kent Beck, on my must read list for developers. Testing is so important and while Unit Testing is becoming mainstream, many are failing to take the next next few steps to integration and system (end-to-end) testing. This book tells you why you should and shows, with practical examples, how to get started.

Growing Object Orientated Software Guided by Tests was the first place I read about the Walking Skeleton. Originally described by Alistair Cockburn, this is a technique I've been using for the last few years and didn't realise there was a name for. The Auction sniper example that covered by the middle chapters introduces not only testing techniques, but lots of useful and practical lessons about good design. The later chapters discuss improving your tests, including readability. The final two chapters cover testing threaded code and asynchronous code. Some of the ideas presented here were new to me and would have have been very useful refactoring exercises for some projects I used to work on.

If you want to develop higher quality, robust software, read and apply the lessons in the book.

Warning: The code examples in the Kindle version of this book are difficult to read and there are a few misprints compared to the paper version.

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