Question

I’ve found several blog posts where TDD/BDD is explained, but the examples are usually really basic. Usually they are just for Models. I want to see how people are really using BDD in Real Life.
I’d love be pointed towards some Django apps that were built test first style so I can learn from them.

I know that Rails had many examples, surely Django has a few examples too.

Answer 1

Your likely doing it right already. For the moment, there’s an ample amount of blog posts from Django developers where they talk about doing Django development right and how they solved issues with testing some heavy-duty stuff, but not a single resource that covers it all, especially not with employing TDD exclusively.

If your into reading other people’s source code, I think your on the best track of learning how experienced Python and Django developers do their magic, manage, test and redistribute their code.

I’d suggest you make a commitment to hop over to GitHub, Bitbucket or Project Hosting on Google Code regularly and query for Django projects. It’s great to get involved with something small that you can quickly sink your teeth into and really understand whats going on and maybe even go a step further and see how you can contribute.

Unfortunately, I’m not aware of there being any Django project that’s distributed with documentation on how development is being performed. It’s not really the wild wild west: there’s versioned documentation, wishlists, issue trackers, TODOs, branches and tags that show the development timelines, but not exactly something that covers the whole process from thought to a full, clean realization.

And too, unfortunately, most books deal with developing Django applications without a set development methodology. I think that’s only fair, because people have their own way of doing things and tools that work best for them and a book like that would need to be at least 2000 pages long to cover all the variables..

I personally like to try doing something myself and then learn by example from other people by looking on what they’ve done to address the same problem; I feel that gives me a full perspective with the rights, wrongs and whys of doing things. I recently decoupled an app from my project by using the contentypes framework and I wasn’t all too comfortable on how my tests turned out. I then looked at the tests from django-tagging by James Bennett and saw where my thinking went awry and it really helped me a lot.