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Chess TDD 41: Finishing up White Pawn Movement

This post was the first of another three that I recorded together.  I wanted to tie up some loose ends and move on to implementing pawn movement for black, but I just wound up tying up loose ends.

On a meta note, I’m going on vacation out of the country for a week, so I may or may not be in a position to log in and push posts live this week. It may be a light week for DaedTech posts.

What I accomplish in this clip:

  • Got IsNonCaptureAllowed working properly

Here are some lessons to take away:

  • There’s nuance to when to drive your design/development with acceptance tests versus unit tests.  TDD is generally good when you want to iterate quickly to get a narrow implementation right.
  • There’s no harm in extracting out a method from a test so that you can save yourself typing in the next test you’re writing.  (As long as you’re green while you do it)
  • It’s not relevant to my series, per se, but it’s worth knowing what characterization tests are.
  • Look out for the sunk cost fallacy with your own code.  The fact that you’ve pulled out and spent time creating a method doesn’t mean that the method is actually beneficial or valuable.
  • Beware of iceberg classes.

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Oded Coster
Oded Coster
8 years ago

The first two tests of IsNonCaptureAllowed are identical (passing in (3,3) to the helper method). The second one – Returns_False_For_RightOne_UpTwo should pass (3, 4).

Erik Dietrich
8 years ago
Reply to  Oded Coster

Yikes! Good catch, thanks. I’ll have to fix when I get back from my trip.