I have been practicing TDD and (some) XP for a few years now and have found that it solves many of the problems I had in my career previous to it’s adoption. By removing so many headaches, my love of coding has been rejuvenated. The problem is I have also found it difficult to find .NET (my current stack) projects utilizing these practices.
My question for the SO community is:
Which communities (language and/or frameworks) do you feel embrace agile practices such as tdd, (all the xDD’s really) xp, ci, etc the most?
For this question to be asked, a means of measurement must be defined. I would define it for a given community/stack as:
(number of current projects embracing agile methodologies) / (number of current projects)
Obviously without data that probably does not exist this is impossible to determine…I am just looking for people’s perceptions
I have toes in both the Rails and the Django camps. From what I see, the Rails folks really get testing. They talk about testing in blogs, talk about testing in conferences, and spin off some interesting testing tools (e.g., ScrewUnit) for testing the non-Rails parts of their apps. It’s really hard to be part of the Rails community and not test.
The Django community lags behind on the testing front. Django ships with basic support for testing, but you have to look for it. None of current Django books do much more than give testing a footnote, and I rarely see any substantive “how to test” blogs from Django community members. There were no talks on testing at the first DjangoCon.
On the flip side, Rails people are far more likely to get themselves into messes dues to monkeypatching and gem version conflicts (or gems or plugins doing conflicting monkeypatching), so automated testing is essential. The Django projects I’ve seen have been able to skate by because it’s harder to get yourself into the same trouble.
As for other agile practices, it’s hard to say without being able to peek inside of a lot of projects on a day-to-day basis.