ChessTDD 24: Cleaning Up for Acceptance Testing

It’s been a little while since I posted to this series, largely because of the holiday time.  I’ve wrapped up some things that I’d been working on and am hoping here in the next few weeks to have some time to knock out several episodes of this, so look for an elevated cadence (fingers crossed).  To get back into the swing of things in this episode, I’m going to pull back a bit from the acceptance test writing and clean up some residual cruft so that when I resume writing the acceptance tests in earnest, I’m reacquainted with the code base and working with cleaner code.

Here’s what I accomplish in this clip:

• Refactored awkward test setup to push board population to production code.
• Got rid of casting in acceptance tests (and thus prepared for a better implementation as we start back up).

Here are some lessons to take away:

• Refactoring is an interesting exercise in the TDD world when you’re moving common functionality from tests to production.  Others’ mileage may vary, but I consider this to be a refactoring, so even moving this from test code to production code, I try to stay green as I go.
• I made a mistake in moving on during a refactoring when my dots went dark green.  Turns out they were green for the project I was in even while another project and thus the solution were not compiling.  It’s good to be mindful of gotchas like this so that you’re not refactoring, thinking that everything is fine, when in reality you’re not building/passing.  This is exactly the problem with non-TDD development — you’re throwing a lot of code around without verification that what you’re doing isn’t creating problems.
• It’s not worth agonizing over the perfect implementation.  If what you’re doing is better than what existed before, you’re adding value.
• If you’re working experimentally and trying things out and your tests stay green for a while when you’re doing this, make sure you can get to red.  Take a second and break something as a sanity check.  I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to be working for a while and assume that everything’s good, only to learn that you’d somehow, inadvertently made the tests necessarily always pass for some trivial reason.