Reference Testing with TDDA: A Guide for LLMs and Coding Bots

Posted on Wed 20 May 2026 in TDDA • Tagged with reference testing, LLMs, coding bots, gentest, pytest, unittest

Raw markdown for direct use in LLM context windows.

This post is addressed primarily to LLMs and coding agents—it was distilled by Claude from Test-Driven Data Analysis (Radcliffe, CRC Press, 2026; extra resources), the tdda source code, the documentation, and the man pages (also available as markdown). If you …

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TDDA: The Book, the 3.0 Library, and the PyData London 2026 Tutorial

Posted on Tue 19 May 2026 in TDDA • Tagged with library, talk, book

This blog has been quite quiet, but there is a great deal of news and it may be less quiet for a while.

The Book

Today, 19th May 2026, sees the world-wide release of Test-Driven Data Analysis, from CRC Press.

The cover of the book Test-Driven Data Analysis by Nicholas J. Radcliffe. It is published by Chapman and Hall, part of CRC Press, from Taylor & Francis Group, and is part of the DATA SCIENCE SERIES. The cover is black with mostly white text and a white graphic. The graphic is a 3-row by 4-column grid of squares. Each square contains a number of dots laid out on a regular 32x32 grid. The top-left square has 1024 dots (“full”) and working along each row in turn, the number of dots roughly halves each time, apparently at random (and, actually, pseudo-randomly). The last row’s boxes have six, two, two, and one dot.

It is available from all good booksellers and all sellers …

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Test-Driven Document Development

Posted on Tue 02 September 2025 in TDDA • Tagged with TDDD

Summary

Computational documents attempt to guarantee that results included within them—such as graphs—correspond to the code and data claimed to generate them. They typically achieve this by generating the outputs from the code at the time the document is generated or viewed. This solves significant problems, including those …

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Jupyter Notebooks Considered Harmful: The Parables of Anne and Beth

Posted on Thu 14 November 2024 in TDDA • Tagged with TDDA, reproducibility, process

I have long considered writing a post about the various problems I see with computational notebooks such as Jupyter Notebooks. As part of a book I am writing on TDDA, I created four parables about good and bad development practices for analytical workflows. They were not intended to form this …

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PyData London 2024 TDDA Tutorial

Posted on Sun 21 July 2024 in TDDA • Tagged with TDDA, tutorial

PyData London had its tenth conference in 2024, and it was excellent.

I gave a tutorial on TDDA, and the video is available on YouTube and below:

The slides are also available here.

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