What's next after attaining the black belt mastery in TDD? The next phase in software engineering maturity is TCR. Here is a brief description of the reasons leading to TCR discipline.

1. SOFTWARE ENGINEERING GOING BEYOND
THE BLACK BELT
The Final Frontier?
Alex Bunardzic

3. Eventually some will graduate to black belt

4. What happens next?

5. Graduation path
● From yellow to black belt – Masters degree course
of study
● After Masters degree – PhD course of study
● After PhD – post-doctoral fellowship

6. Required skills
● Discipline
● Experimentation
● Innovation

7. Not for the faint-hearted?

8. What is the problem?

9. Code-as-text

10. Computers are phenomenally stupid and cannot
understand text

11. In order for computers to execute our code, these
machines need interpreters to compile the code
into machine instructions

13. Pioneer programmers

14. Shift-left

15. Shift-left doesn’t mean how much time is left until
the end of shift

17. “The trick is never to let the code not be working.”
- Ron Jeffries

18. How do we know if the code is working?

21. The code is working if it passes the tests

24. Just because the code compiles and runs doesn’t
mean it’s working

25. When is the code not working?

26. When writing code without intermittently running
tests, the code is not working!

27. When is the code working?

28. When coding session gets frequently interrupted by
running tests (similar to a galloping horse hitting
the ground often)

29. Minimize the ‘in-flight’ time (i.e. shorten the
duration between coding and running tests)

30. Maximize interruptability/steerability (courtesy of
GeePaw Hill)

31. Optimize chances of adopting and promulgating
change

32. We’re aiming at steady state – no changes to the
code behaviour and the system passes all tests

33. The best way to maintain steady state is to remain
grounded (and squish the bugs!)

34. How to ensure we often get the code to work?

35. When doing TDD, how often do we run tests?

36. Lower maturity TDD practitioners would run all
tests when CI build pipeline gets triggered

37. Higher maturity TDD practitioners would run all
tests before committing code changes

39. How frequent are commits?

41. How to increase the frequency of commits?

42. Why not leverage the most frequent action we do
when coding?

44. As we’re coding, we tend to save changes quite
frequently

46. Let’s trap the save actions and run tests then and
there!

48. Configure Visual Source Code

49. Let’s build a trivial tool by leveraging the
newfangled save-and-commit approach

50. Tip Calculator
● As a patron
I want to calculate the total bill (total plus the tip)
Because I want to compliment the restaurant for the service
● Scenario #1: Patron calculates the total for terrible service
Given that the restaurant total is $100.00
And the service was terrible
When the tip calculator calculates the total charge
Then tip calculator shows $100.00 total charge

51. Tip Calculator
● Scenario #2: Patron calculates the total for poor service
● Given that the restaurant total is $100.00
And the service was poor
When the tip calculator calculates the total charge
Then tip calculator shows $105.00 total charge

52. Tip Calculator
● Scenario #3: Patron calculates the total for good service
● Given that the restaurant total is $100.00
And the service was good
When the tip calculator calculates the total charge
Then tip calculator shows $110.00 total charge

53. Tip Calculator
● Scenario #4: Patron calculates the total for great service
● Given that the restaurant total is $100.00
And the service was great
When the tip calculator calculates the total charge
Then tip calculator shows $115.00 total charge

54. Tip Calculator
● Scenario #5: Patron calculates the total for excellent service
● Given that the restaurant total is $100.00
And the service was excellent
When the tip calculator calculates the total charge
Then tip calculator shows $120.00 total charge