This week was very intensive in terms of education. First, a three-day training about Test-Driven Development at Pragmatists, then presentation about Vaadin by Bartek Kuczyński at Warsaw JUG meeting.

However, in this post I will focus on the most interesting thing, Test-Driven Development training and what I learnt there. The whole event lasted three days and in my opinion it was very effectively spent time. The only thing I didn’t like was a little too long theoretical introduction to the TDD and testing, but it is probably the feature of most trainings that the first chapter must be about only a theory. Fortunately, later it started to be much, much more interesting and the workshops began. They consisted of  pair programming, writing tests, refactoring to patterns, mocking with Mockito, everything I expected from this training when I had enrolled. And everything in the amount that helped be to understand philosophy of software development with TDD on the practical side. Only a basic level, however, because to do it smoothly and quickly I have to spend a lot of time on Test-Driving and learning. But I did the first step.

Unfortunately at the beginning of this training it appeared that my lovely IDE (NetBeans) isn’t a natural-born IDE for TDD. And what’s the problem? NB isn’t smart enough when we are coding and trying to generate code by intention. For example, let’s compare process of creating testing method and how two IDEs: Eclipse and NetBeans are helping us in the following scenario:

After placing cursor over the user variable and pressing Alt+Enter (NetBeans) or Ctrl+1 (Eclipse) we will see (Eclipse at the bottom, NetBeans fragment at the top):

Even at this early stage of comparison we can see that Eclipse gives us more flexibility in the process of generating code, it allows to create local variable what will be our most often intention. NetBeans only tries to help us with proposing new class field or even new class what is rather strange idea.

Ok, but lets keep going. Suppose we have a yet undefined variable userService:

and we want to continue writing our test. Ctrl+Space on userService variable in NetBeans will gives us only option to generate UserService class. Whereas Eclipse will return following options: generate class, generate interface, generate enum and additionally convert our class into two strange forms that I didn’t cover here 🙂 But in short, Eclipse gives us many more options to choose from. In our scenario we choose interface. If we choose class, Netbeans would create it in the same package (and we don’t want concrete classes lying next to test classes) and Eclipse would ask us where to place new class.

Going further with our TDD we mock service and create default user. Now we need to add method getCurrentUser().

And here let me introduce a nail in NetBeans’ coffin as a TDD-friendly IDE. It’s a missing ability to code by intention. When we place cursor over missing method and use hint short-cut NetBeans will generally fail and will not suggest any solution. And even TDD newbie like me knows that similar situations in red-green-refactor cycle are very, very common. Of course we could help NetBeans with moving this method out of assertEquals:

And only then we can see “create method” hint. In Eclipse we are not forced to use such tricks and it is possible to create method from the inside of assertions right after we press Ctrl+1. Moreover comparing what both IDEs offer in automatic refactoring area gives us another reason to abandon NetBeans and use Eclipse in our everyday work because the amount of refactor options this IDE has is pretty impressive.

And what are the conclusions? Personally I think that Netbeans isn’t the best free IDE if we consider Test-Driven Development approach. Eclipse is much better for this  and if you are planning to learn TDD I can’t, in spite of my liking and good experience with NetBeans, suggest this IDE as the best choice.