TDD

So a couple of days ago I decided that it was in my best interest to really figure out how Test Driven Development (or TDD) is useful and then to get some hands-on experience. To do so, I read the chapter on Unit Testing in the book Dive Into Python, written by Mark Pilgrim. I wanted to get a more generic sense of how TDD works without getting bogged down by minor details and intricacies of a larger testing suite such as Mailman's.

To employ this newly found knowledge, I wrote a quick test class for one of the classes that runs my server and it turned out to be incredibly helpful. Needless to say, in between my Mailman development I'm going to continue developing a comprehensive test suite for my server in order to both hone my TDD skills and to finally get the damn thing to be as perfectly stable as I'd like.

All in all, I'd say that was a couple of days well spent now that I have a significantly better understanding of TDD and its practical uses. I'm going to dig through the Mailman code and see what I can find out about how the test suite is run and how I should go about defining the test cases for my pipermail Storm conversion.