Test driven development

If you’re a Software Development Manager, ask your engineers if they’re using TDD, and if they’re not, make them start.” Is anyone actually doing this? I mean, lots of people, including me, think it’s a good idea, but who’s actually doing it? Hands up, now!

6 Responses to “Test driven development”

  1. I am. It’s true, it just works. ;-)

    Thijs van der Vossen
  2. Both the Feed Validator and my Universal Feed Parser are test-driven.  The validator was test-driven from day 1; the feed parser had tests added later, but now all new features and bug reports have tests before a single line of code is added.

    It’s not for everything, but it’s for more than you think.

    Mark
  3. I’ve used it for my own small, personal scripts.

    Alas, I haven’t done so at work.

    One of the problems with TDD, and Unit Testing in general, is applying it to web applications.

    Joe Grossberg
  4. I used it with great success for a university software development project last year. And I’ve gotten my developers at work to the point that they do TDD, but unfortunately not automatic testing … they’re still relying on a QA dept that manually runs tests :-\

    Meri
  5. I’d echo Mark - it’s not for everything, but it is for most things. 

    GUIs and web apps tend to be harder (sometimes much harder) than, say, a library, but it’s still be worth trying.

    Jez
  6. Yep, I use it. Joe’s point is well put however - TDD becomes problematic when you are using API’s which are hard to test - web apis being a case in point. It just so happens that APIs written using TDD happen to be easy to test…

    Sam Newman

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