Visual Studio 2012 – Define Tests Run After Build

Practice on existing bugs/defects.

This is a really tough situation. I've never gone all the way to TDD from nothing before, but in my experience, getting a team to go from no unit tests to proactively writing them has been a very "one step at a time" approach.

First, get them comfortable writing unit tests and knowing really what they are and their benefits. For my teams, it's been best to write unit tests for existing bugs. Current bugs in systems have two things that you need to teach people to write unit tests well:

1. an expected precondition and postcondition
2. an outcome that currently is not what is expected and violates that precondition/postcondition

This gives members very concrete practice examples. They can write a test before they fix the bug, so that it fails. Then, they can fix the code so that it passes, and fixes the bug. Once they're comfortable with this, then you can get them the rest of the way so that they can write unit tests with no code up-front and then write new code to get their tests to pass.

I think the trick is to give them something to practice on where there are clear method pre/post-conditions. If requirements for methods are fuzzy, it's hard for even experienced TDD people to know exactly where to start. Take it a step at time and you'll get there. Good luck!

Powershell is the canonical answer if you need access to your project libs, as you wrote. However, for a lot of simple tasks I still use "classic" Windows shell scripts, as long as the task can be easily solved with that. For example, simple file copy operations, folder creation etc. Another alternative is VBScript, if Windows shell script is not powerful enough. VBS misses direct access to .NET libs, but it has access to classic COM components, and was ok for me in the past for example for text file manipulation with regular expressions and similar things.