Importance of Unit Testing and Test Driven Development (TDD)
Why should developers care of automated unit tests?
- Keeps you out of the (time hungry) debugger!
- Reduces bugs in new features and in existing features
- Reduces the cost of change
- Improves design
- Encourages refactoring
- Builds a safety net to defend against other programmers
- Is fun
- Forces you to slow down and think
- Speeds up development by eliminating waste
- Reduces fear
And how TDD takes it to the next level?
- Improves productivity by
- minimizing time spent debugging
- reduces the need for manual (monkey) checking by developers and tester
- helping developers to maintain focus
- reduce wastage: hand overs
- Improves communication
- Creating living, up-to-date specification
- Communicate design decisions
- Learning: listen to your code
- Baby steps: slow down and think
- Improves confidence
- Testable code by design + safety net
- Loosely-coupled design
- Refactoring
