---
title: "Studies in teaching TDD and XP"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/7/17/studies-in-teaching-tdd-and-xp.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/7/17/studies-in-teaching-tdd-and-xp.html"
published: "2004-07-17T16:05:00"
updated: "2004-07-17T16:05:00"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "This site has some interesting papers relating to teaching TDD and Extreme Programming. They list common problems with teaching TDD and XP, how they tried to solve it, and there are also some papers detailing how to do…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Studies in teaching TDD and XP

By Roy Osherove July 17, 2004

**Historical article** · Originally published July 17, 2004; technical details may be outdated.

[This site](http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~rick/xpPapersResources.htm) has some interesting papers relating to teaching TDD and Extreme Programming. They list common problems with teaching TDD and XP, how they tried to solve it, and there are also some papers detailing how to do some  TDD design of abstract classes and interfaces. I should really read all of these. I find myself in the position of questioning a lot about my own methods of teaching these "hard" topics, and its nice to know that the difficulties I'm experiencing are shared by more people.


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/