Test Driven Development Method And How To Use It

I got a lot of criticism on this article. But this is how it works in our company, so it's our experience.

According to information technology spending forecast, investments in all segments of IT sphere will shortly reach more than 2 trillion U.S. dollars. Companies that specialize in software development surely want to create first-rate programs for their clients, however, due to the tools and methods used, building a program may result in great financial loses for customers, if not in them being unable to afford a piece of software according to their needs.

No wonder more and more companies are trying to imply a development model that is both eligible for creating a first-class software and cost-effective. In this article, we’re going to discuss test-driven development approach which has a lot of benefits and specialties that greatly help in creating a cheap yet high-quality product. So if you’re interested in applying one – stay tuned!

What is test-driven development and how it works?

Test-driven development is a methodology that bases on short development cycles replication. When using a TDD approach, tests and code can be written by a single person, however, it’s better to have a team of two programmers or QA engineer and a programmer.

Here’s how TDD method works:

1. QA engineer creates a test to cover all the changes.
2. Developers write code according to specific system behavior.
3. Tests are launched to see if any fails.
4. The written code is refactored with a constant verification of test efficiency.
5. Steps above are repeated.

Benefits of using a test-driven development method

When using test-driven development methodology, developers focus on required features implementation without adding unnecessary ones and are able to create a maintainable code and reduce the number of bugs already on the development stage.

Currently, software developers use test-driven method due to many reasons, some of which are:

• Focus on modular programming. Test-driven development is a great way to understand the basic principles of a modular structure as writing small tests one at a time means more work with the modular code.

• Simplified code maintenance. Test-driven method supports a transparent integration process and reduces security risks during the programming code reorganization. As this approach to writing a code allows to run tests before creating the final version, refactoring also becomes much quicker and easier to perform.

• Timely bug fixing. As developers begin with writing tests and not coding, it helps to eliminate bugs right from the start. This way, any issue can be detected and fixed a way faster than usual.

• Meeting customer expectations. With the help of test-driven approach to software development, we can one more time confirm all the customer requirements which result in more accurate job. Thus, developers create the product according to clients’ needs without any unexpected updates.

• Team cooperation. In case of any issues with the written code, developers can easily modify its parts. As if the code starts running improperly, the test will crash immediately and programmers will know what to do at once.

Software development is not an easy task even if modern tools and methods, for example, DevOps approach are used. However, with the help of the right methodology such as the test-driven one we can significantly reduce the amount of time spent on software building which affects the total cost of creating a program.