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Any Interest in Building Test Driven Community?

Sunday, May 27, 2007 10:25 AM
Here's the deal: I love forums.  In my experience I tend to learn more just from lurking around in forums with topics that interest me than I ever do from some book.  They're also a great place to find a wealth of information whether it be tips for just starting out or for helping you to track down that hard to find problem.

But here's the problem, much to my surprise I've been unable to find a good test driven development community online.  Don't get me wrong, it's not that I haven't found any...it's just that I haven't found any that seem to be very active.  For example, TestDriven.com seems to have the makings of a great community.  It has a nice, easy to navigate site, information from relevant sponsors, and plenty of forum topics covering many aspects of TDD.  There's only one problem, activity on this site seems to be almost non-existent.  I subscribed to the forum activity on this site several months ago with my RSS reader and since then all I've received is silence on the wire, save the occasional spam post from a vendor.

So here's the deal, I'd like to have a nice test driven community to turn to whenever I need advice, have questions, or just want to talk about some of the finer aspects of it.  In fact, I would even venture to say that I'm not entirely alone in this desire.  So, rather than continue my fruitless search for an active community, I'm beginning to believe that I should just build one.

So this is what I need from the community.  Let me know if you would like to have a community centered on test driven development to turn to as well.  You can share your opinion either by leaving a note in the comments, filling out the short one question survey below, or both.

Click Here to take survey

Just so we're sure that we're all on the same page about this, I've included a little mini-FAQ below:

What kind of site would this be?
In the beginning, this site will be a forums site similar TestDriven.com.  The forums content is my highest priority right now and will likely be the main draw at first.  However, if the site begins to build a reasonable community base, I would like to eventually include regular features such as polls, book reviews, or articles which would all be generated by the community.

How will this site be supported?
I'm not interested in making money off of the site, only in creating a centralized location in which fans of TDD can congregate.  Therefore I will not be charging membership fees, selling 'tiered memberships, or any of that nonsense.  However, as hosting and bandwidth costs may be a hurdle, I plan to support the site through relative, context-based advertising such as AdSense.

What will this site be written in?
Probably whatever will get us up and running the fastest.  At this time leading contenders include RoR or an ASP.NET community platform such as DotNetNuke or CommunityServer.

Will this site be an open source project?
There are no plans at this time to open up the project for community development.  I would, however, have no objections to making the source code publicly available under a permissive license if there is significant interest from the community.

What technologies will this site focus on?
One my main goals with this site would be to attract as large of a community as possible.  With that in mind, I would like for the site to remain as language and technology agnostic as possible.  I will create specialized topics to address quirks specific to TDD with different languages (i.e., 'TDD with Java', 'TDD with .NET', 'TDD with Ruby') but I feel that the principles surrounding TDD surpass the language barrier and, as such, would like many discussions to focus on the principles and philosophies of TDD itself.

One final note:  I normally, as a rule, refrain from submitting posts which do not contain technical content to aggregaters.  I'm going to make an exception this time, however, in an attempt to get this in front of as many as possible to get as accurate as a gauge as possible of the community's feelings.  If you would like to help, please feel free to submit this to any aggregaters that I may have missed.

kick it on DotNetKicks.com

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# re: Any Interest in Building Test Driven Community?

I'd love to see an active TDD community, however the biggest problem with TDD is there aren't any easy to follow and understand tutorials on doing TDD. Most everything I find is a hello world with barely any explantion of what was done.

I'm sorry, but as a junior developer it is hard enough to wrap my head around what I am doing much less try to learn from scratch with no examples something and what I am supposed to be doing.

Basically, the community could grow if there was more beginner content out there beyond the hello world and things were explained more. 5/30/2007 8:28 PM | Buddy Lindsey

# re: Any Interest in Building Test Driven Community?

There is already a significant number of people over at the testdrivendevelopment yahoo group. It is technology agnoistic and many 'leading lights' of TDD are there. I'm not sure what the purpose of fragmenting the community further would be? 5/31/2007 4:18 AM | Ian Cooper

# re: Any Interest in Building Test Driven Community?

Buddy,

Thanks for the info. Those are absolutely great points. I agree, I faced a huge uphill battle when first trying to learn TDD for the exact reasons you mentioned. Furthermore, I've never really been able to find a good intro level book on the subject either.

If this works out that is definitely an aspect I'll be considering, and since the site will belong to the community I'd love for you to be involved.

Thanks for the suggestion,
Jeremy 5/31/2007 2:37 PM | Jeremy

# re: Any Interest in Building Test Driven Community?

Ian,

Thanks for the heads up regarding the yahoo group. I've included the link below for any other interested parties. I didn't realize that the group was active and I certainly have no intention in forking what is already, by comparison to most methodologies, a small group. Rest assured, I'll be watching the group's activities in coming days before making any decisions.

Link:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/testdrivendevelopment/

Thanks!
Jeremy 5/31/2007 2:40 PM | Jeremy

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