Coupling and cohesion have been discussed for a long time as the right criteria for judging a design. But there seemed to be no objective way to determine if code exhibited those qualities. Could TDD lead to higher cohesion and loose coupling?
(more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Test Driven Development’
Bug Fixes and TDD
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008Code has bugs. Finding a bug’s hiding place is a challenge. And, you know that killing a bug often breaks code in unexpected ways, hatching more bugs to discover, hunt down, and kill.
If you created your whole code base using TDD, you could prevent many of these new bugs. But you have legacy code; code without tests. How should the professional software Orkinman apply DDT, I mean TDD, to bugs in existing code. (Orkin (r), do i have to do this in a blog?)
(more…)
Physics of Test Driven Development
Saturday, June 7th, 2008Test Driven Development is a challenging practice. Why should you bother to learn it? You should learn it because it is a productive and predictable way to develop software.
Let’s compare TDD to the most popular way of programming, something I call Debug Later Programming. In DLP, code is considered “done” after it is designed and written. After the code is “done” it is debugged. Hmmm. Interesting definition of done isn’t it? The definition fails to include about half the effort.
Tests vs. Short Term Cache Between Your Ears
Monday, May 5th, 2008You have someone else’s code. You have to use it. To use it you have to learn it. If the code had automated unit tests you could read the unit tests to see how the code behaves. But, it probably does not have unit tests. So, you read the documentation. The documentation usually leaves some room for interpretation in the best case. It lies and misleads in the worst case. What do you do? You read the code.
(more…)