Presenter First: organizing complex GUI applications for test-driven development

Presenter First (PF) is a technique for organizing source code and development activities to produce fully tested GUI applications from customer stories using test-driven development. The three elements of Presenter First are a strategy for how applications are developed and tested, a variant on the Model View Presenter (MVP) design pattern, and a particular means of composing MVP triads. Presenter tests provide an economical alternative to automated GUI system tests. We have used Presenter First on projects ranging in size from several to a hundred MVP triads. This paper describes MVP creation, composition, scaling, and the tools and process we use. An example C# application illustrates the application of the Presenter First technique.