Hi I hope this is not OT. I'm training my replacement at work to do BDD Rails development. He's done a CS/maths degree but has no professional programming experience, so he's never NOT done a project without BDD. In a way I am jealous of his unspoilt situation :)
I've gone about things this way: * first teach him some Ruby (he did mainly Java at uni) * then let him write a small program (to a rough description I came up with) in Ruby however he wants * then teach him how to do BDD-driven OO * then let him re-write the sample app in a BDD way. The app loads a YAML file that lists some URLs, fetches the pages off the interweb, extracts some data from the body of the spec, and outputs it to XML. He's picking stuff up quick - he wrote it in about 1 1/2 days despite only learning Ruby last week. I've gone through a really simple BDD example with him that is quite similar to part of the bigger app - he seems to follow the syntax of RSpec and flexmock, understands the concepts of full and partial mocks, etc. But I've left him to rewrite his app along the same lines, and it's like there is a void. Where before he just kept working at little bits until the output built up, now he's got the ability to isolate simple bits of code and develop/test them (eg formatting a <page> tag from a URL), he's taking longer. He seems to be struggling to pick isolated pieces of functionality out of the bigger problem. One thing I have done for him is write a functional test - one that runs the whole app "WebParse.run(infile, outfile)" black-box style, and compares the output in "outfile" to the output of his existing app (which we've decided between us is correct and suitable as a reference). I'm not sure if this has helped or confused the issue. Clearly there is something important I am not explaining, something I take for granted. Does anyone have any ideas what? I was hoping someone else here has been through the experience of teaching BDD (RSpec or otherwise) from scratch and may be able to point me in the right direction. Thanks for any advice Ashley PS I haven't told him to subscribe to this list yet, so I'm safe to talk about him for a bit :o) -- blog @ http://aviewfromafar.net/ linked-in @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleymoran currently @ work _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
