TITLE: Test Driven Development: the Agile Gem 

SPEAKER: Alain Desilets, Research Officer, National Research Council 

DATE: 26th January 2006 

ABSTRACT: 

Test Driven Development (TDD) is arguably the most useful technique 
to have come out of the Agile Software Development world. With TDD, 
software is coded through a sequence of very short cycles, each one 
starting with the writing of a failing test and ending with modifications 
to the code which make the test pass while preserving the structural 
integrity of the system. This deceptively simple technique turns out to 
have profound consequences at various levels, including design, 
documentation, relationship to the customer, developer satisfaction, 
and of course, software quality. In this talk, Alain will present the principles 
of TDD and do a live demo, programming in TDD style in front of the audience, 
in order to give a flavour of the particular rhythm and feel of this invaluable 
practice. 

BIOGRAPHY: 

Alain Desilets is a Research Officer at the National Research Council 
of Canada, working on what might be called "Good Applications for Crummy 
Human Language Technologies" (speech recognition, machine translation, 
natural language understanding). He has 20 years experience in developing, 
testing and validating experimental software in the context of projects with 
very high levels of uncertainty. He has been using automated regression 
testing since his very first programming course in 1984, and has been practising 
Extreme Programming (including Test Driven Development) since 2000.