Code 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?)
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Test 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.