Julio Santos

The brilliant Alistair Cockburn, during a talk he gave recently to the bayxp folks, referred to XXDD, which was entirely new to me.

Apparently Alistair, and Jeff Fredrick and a couple of other folks, were talking about how lame the term TDD was (TDD stands for Test Driven Development). It’s supposed to be lame because as any decent agilist knows

“Test Driven Development Is Not About Tests”(™).

Which is like saying that Computer Science is not about computers (interestingly, that’s true, CS is not about science, just like astronomy is not about telescopes, but I quickly digress)

You can read all about the rationale right….here.

I would like to say a few things:

1) Jeff! I resent that you never mentioned this fine story to me. My only hope is that your source of inspiration was what you were drinking at the time, and that you forgot all about it the next day.

2) Couldn’t the whole thing be solved if instead of Test Driven Development, you call it Test Driven *Design*? Because, though TDD is not about testing, it is about design!

3) Great. Just when I no longer need to say that Extreme Programming is not about coding while skydiving, I now need to start saying that XXDD is not about beer. Oh, and XX is *not* good beer. This is where good beer comes from.