TDD - Test Driven Development —13 February 2011

Finally, I started using this technique I read about in The producive programmer by Neal Ford called Test Driven Development (TDD). Basically, you write up all the test cases before writing actual code.

The technique naturally (and inevitably!) forces you to reduce cyclomatic complexity, as it is a lot easier to write unit tests for simple methods that do just one thing. At first it really felt like a tedious thing to do, but after about an hour I already see the process is guiding me to simpler, more robust coding. This is seriously good stuff.

Despite the overhead of writing up the unit tests, I have a feeling that the overall time I’ll be spending on this will be less, considering all the potentially obscure bugs I’ll be avoiding this way. Totally awesome.