Review – Test-Driven Development (Astels)

Test-Driven Development: A Practical Guide, Dave Astels. Prentice Hall PTR, 2003.
This book is a natural complement to Kent Beck’s Test-Driven Development: By Example. Where Kent’s is focused on the background and theory, Dave’s book focuses on tools, GUI testing, and an extended example. You’ll get overviews of JUnit, JUnitPerf, JFCUnit, PyUnit, EasyMock and many others. The example is long (almost half the book), but it gives you an expert’s view on a reasonably large project.

The big thing I learned from this book was that I could and should be much more aggressive in refactoring my tests and in keeping them focused on one thing at a time. And I value this book as a quick-reference for the many TDD-related tools. (Reviewed December, ’03)