Supporting material for the presentation "Test Driving a CLD" held during GLA Summit 2022.
Test Driven Development and Design (TDD) directly improves the design and there are many advantages from following the dicipline. Without having first hand experience of TDD, it is quite difficult to understand how and why it works. The purpose of the presentation is to elaborate on this topic and explain, through example, how TDD'ing improves design. For a demonstration of the workflow, please see the demonstration here.
The slides from the presentation are availble here.
To run the unit tests you will need LUnit Unit Test Framework available at VIPM.
To learn more on this topic, here is a few suggestions. Please feel free add more and create a pull request.
You can always reach out to me directly to discuss more on this topic, I'm keen to talk and learn. As I am an independent consultant, it is also rather easy to setup pair programming sessions (either in person or online) where we work on your code using TDD. I think this is a great way of learning the mindset and getting into the flow.
- During GDevCon a presentation was given on TDD focusing on handling hardware and the edges of a system. The presentation is available here.
- For a demonstration of the TDD workflow, see this video where the game of snake is developed test by test. If you like it, do let me know so I know if I should produce more content.
- For an introduction to the LUnit Unit Testing Framework, see the presenation from GLASummit 2021.
- For an introduction to unit testing in general and the tools available in LabVIEW, I made a presentation during GLA Summit 2021. This is available here.
- Within the LabVIEW world I have not seen a lot of content on this topic. Sam has some great posts on his blog which are worth reading.
- Outside the LabVIEW world there is a lot of good stuff and TDD is much more common. I would recommend material for java or C# as the patterns tend to be most similar to what can be done in LabVIEW.
- You can also have a look at other repositories at GitHub, such as the source code for LUnit or the Triarc Application Framework. They are all open source and developed using TDD. A good starting point is the examples for our application framework. These are all developed using TDD with the tests in the repo and it should give an idea of what it may look like.
Thanks again for the interest and please let me know if you find this helpful or if you have suggestions. Any feedback will directly impact future topics I might bring up with the community, so thanks in advance.