Test-Driven Development
MOOC.fi

Practicalities (Spring 2025)

Enrollment and study credits

If you are a student in Finland or Europe, you may receive 4 or 5 study credits from completing this course. See the enrollment instructions for details. Receiving study credits requires completing the course while the course is active.

For everyone, after completing and submitting all the exercises, you will receive a certificate (see example) that you can show off as a trophy. 🏅 You will receive the certificate even if the course is not active.

Discord channel

Communication and study groups will happen remotely over Discord. Join the course's Discord channel through https://study.cs.helsinki.fi/discord/join/tdd

Course duration

The course will start on Wednesday 15.1.2025 at 16:15 (Europe/Helsinki timezone) in Discord tdd_voice channel with an information session.

The course will end on Monday 12.5.2025. There is no exam, but only the exercises. Submit all your exercises before the end of that day (Anywhere on Earth timezone).

If you want to receive study credits, remember to enroll on the course before the course end date (Europe/Helsinki timezone), as the registration will close then.

Study groups

We will have study groups about once per month, on Wednesday, from 16:15 until 16:30-18:00 (Europe/Helsinki timezone) in Discord tdd_voice channel while the course is active. Join the channel before 16:30. The study group will end early if the agenda runs out or there are no people present.

The dates of the study groups:

  • 15.1.2025: course practicalities, TDD intro and demo, getting started with TDD (what tests to write first), Q&A
  • 22.1.2025: review of exercise 1 (example solution, comparing strategies), checkup of current blockers etc.
  • 19.2.2025: checkup of current blockers etc.
  • 19.3.2025: checkup of current blockers etc.
  • 16.4.2025: checkup of current blockers etc.
  • 7.5.2025: checkup of current blockers etc.

The agenda will be improvised on the fly, based on what the participants are working on currently, because on this course the students do the exercises at their own pace. It's an opportunity (the only opportunity) to receive feedback from your code quality. This could include code review, refactoring, pair or mob programming, ad-hoc exercises etc. Have your programming environment ready when joining a study group.

There are things about design that you won't notice until somebody points them out to you, so it's highly recommended to show your code to more experienced developers.

Exercises

Do the exercises at your own pace and use the #tdd_general Discord channel for peer help.

Exercise submissions

Submit your completed exercises to https://studies.cs.helsinki.fi/stats/courses/tdd-2025

When submitting there, you will need to provide a link to a GitHub repository with your solution to the exercise. If your repository is private, please add luontola as a collaborator to your private repository so that we can view it.

Screen recording

For the last exercise, you will need to also create a screen recording video of when you do the exercise. It's kind of like the final exam of the course. You will not be rated based on how well you use TDD, only whether you use TDD or not.

The recordings may be used for research purposes to improve the course, to see how well this course manages to teach people TDD. If some of you would volunteer to record all of their exercises, that would be interesting research material as well.

It's quite easy to do screen recording with OBS Studio - all the kids on Twitch can do it, and so can you. You can upload the videos to a video streaming service of your choice.

Proceed to Exercises