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Behavior driven development (BDD) and test driven development (TDD) enable much faster coding when done well in my experience, and that includes full coverage f

by jph 9y ago

Behavior driven development (BDD) and test driven development (TDD) enable much faster coding when done well in my experience, and that includes full coverage fast unit tests, functional tests, benchmark tests, and integration tests. Unit tests are worth their weight in gold for quickly finding issues, both in our team's code and especially in cases of subtle changes among language releases, or unanticipated input changes, or dependency changes that are supposed to work but don't. IMHO unit tests lead to better functional approaches, better long range maintainability, better security, and much better handling of corner cases.

hacker_9 9y ago
I think the main selling point for me on TDD was breaking the boring build loop where I would have to wait for the project to compile, the webpage to load, click on all the buttons to get to the bit I'm testing, and then finally see if my code worked. Then repeat as many times as it fails. With TDD testing functionality is always just one button click away - I actually have fun again at work.
Chris2048 9y ago
> enable much faster coding Faster than what?
ntrepid8 9y ago
For large code bases in dynamic languages I think the advantage grows larger over time. Even a modest amount of test coverage will allow you to build new features without breaking existing features. It's a lot faster to catch bugs when the tests run in your local development environment or in the CI pipeline than to wait until Q/A (hopefully) catches them in end-to-end integration testing and sends it back to you for rework. The other advantage I've noticed is that the tests can serve as an additional form of documentation. New team members can look through the tests to see how code is supposed to work from the examples there. For some web API projects I've even been able to generate the documentation from the test cases.

by jph 9y ago

hacker_9 9y ago

I think the main selling point for me on TDD was breaking the boring build loop where I would have to wait for the project to compile, the webpage to load, click on all the buttons to get to the bit I'm testing, and then finally see if my code worked. Then repeat as many times as it fails. With TDD testing functionality is always just one button click away - I actually have fun again at work.

Chris2048 9y ago

> enable much faster coding Faster than what?

ntrepid8 9y ago

For large code bases in dynamic languages I think the advantage grows larger over time. Even a modest amount of test coverage will allow you to build new features without breaking existing features. It's a lot faster to catch bugs when the tests run in your local development environment or in the CI pipeline than to wait until Q/A (hopefully) catches them in end-to-end integration testing and sends it back to you for rework. The other advantage I've noticed is that the tests can serve as an additional form of documentation. New team members can look through the tests to see how code is supposed to work from the examples there. For some web API projects I've even been able to generate the documentation from the test cases.