Hangout on TDD with Kent Beck and David Heinemeier Hansson

As we’ve announced via Twitter, Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) and I will be doing a series of video hangouts to discuss TDD, and the trade-offs around testing and architecture. The first one is on Friday May 9, at 11:00 Eastern time. The hangout will be around 30 minutes and will be recorded so you can watch it later. We’ll also release an audio version via a podcast stream for those like me who hate watching videos.

The genesis of this is a couple of conversations between us that happened over the internet after DHH’s RailsConf keynote. We found the conversations really interesting so Kent suggested that we should have some more of these, and make them available to the wider internet. We’ve done very little organisation for these - no further than partial outline - so we’ll be sorting out our direction as we go.

Since we announced it, there’s been many suggestions to get more people involved, particularly Bob Martin (Uncle Bob) who has been very active in the post-RailsConf debate. We’d prefer to stick with just the three of us, because adding extra people to the mix usually changes the chemistry of a conversation significantly. We’re sure that if these work well there will be more hangouts with different mixes of people in the future.

We should also say that the conversation may not live up to many people’s expectations - at least judging by many of the tweets we’ve seen. Many people speak of looking forward to a “death match” fight between us. But the whole reason we’re doing this is that our conversations have taken a very thoughtful nature. We hope to be witty and entertaining, but we are more interested in exploring these topics in a way that expands our understanding of each others’ ideas.