Jessta Roll

Unit Testing: first or last?

drealmer:

Testing is good, and so is unit testing. But how beneficial is TDD? TDD implies that you write the tests first, then write the code that satisfies them. A study from 2005 compared the results from a small sample of two CS student teams, one doing TDD and the other one writing tests after the code. It showed interesting results, but it’s not easy to figure out a conclusion, and it seems that it all depends if the goal is productivity or quality.

I once wrote my tests first, then I wrote my code, then I ran the tests, my code passed every test first time….the tests and the code were both wrong.