The way I see it there are three aspects of a software projects that are worth noting, (or at least that I will focus on in this blog post):

1. The technical aspect

2. The process aspect

3. The meta techincal aspect

The technical aspect are all the aspects that every developer (hopefully) knows, like the programming language, the framework, the application servers etc.

The process aspect is the stuff like scrum, kanban ,lean etc.

The meta technical stuff is what I’ll zoom in on now.

First of all I’m not sure this it the best term, and probably someone has coined a better one…

However the way I see it these three aspects has to be in place for a project to suceed. The first two are usually in place, the first handled by the developer and the second by the project manager or scrum master or someone in similar roles.

However I see the last aspect often being neglected.

The meta technical aspect is about the framework of doing the technical stuff. so I would say it is for instance:

-TDD (BDD)

- SOLID

- IOC

So I would describe it as all the technical stuff that many hardcore developers do not care that much about, but that makes the quality of the code higher, and makes the code more maintainable.

The problem is that many people going into software development care about technical stuff, and care about breaking that small technical problem. But they don’t find the meta technical stuff as interesting.

OK there, for a while I was a bit worried about if I should stick with unit testing.

For a while I have been in doubt, for mainly two reasons:

1. I went to ANUG where Martin Olesen presented on BDD and stated that he didn’t always do TDD.

2. Ayende presented on JAOO Danish .Net User Group and stated that he only do unit testing in very few places in NHProf and used TDD even fewer places.

This all made me think about TDD and Unit testing, since two really smart guys felt this way about unit testing.

However aften some thought and scrum master training with Jeff Sutherland, where he stated: “All the best teams I see are running XP inside scrum”, meaning the best teams also practice TDD, I now conclude TDD is still OK! - Phew :-)

But OK now why do the two afore-mentioned smart guys not use unit testing intensively?

Well first and foremost these two guys are not new with software development, and since TDD is a design technique, they might not need it.

Ayende actually stated that he still did TDD on the hard parts (as I understand it, where he finds design hard).

Secondly Ayende presented on how he made implementing a feature in NHProf really simple, actuallly so simple it was not designed. And he stille tested it – using integration tests.

Thirdly Martin Olesen stated that his team was still not good enough to drop TDD, he would like to, but it was not possible.

So TDD is still OK!