http://push.cx/2007/drifting-into-test-driven-development A tea-drinking web geek's coffee-flavored blog Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:38:38 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 http://push.cx/2007/drifting-into-test-driven-development/comment-page-1#comment-87182 nothing happens Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:06:16 +0000 http://push.cx/2007/drifting-into-test-driven-development#comment-87182 [...] Pretty soon, you’re not keeping track of so much in your head at once, focusing on a little bit of functionality at a time, and then those spare brain cycles start thinking ahead, start coming up with those edge cases and error conditions you usually forget about. You start writing TODO comments in your tests to remind you to test those error and edge cases; pretty soon, you start writing those TODOs in the form of markTestIncomplete(). Then one day you’re adding one of those stub tests you mean to come back to later, when your brain jumps ahead to how to write the test. Before you’ve even implemented the thing it’s gonna test. So you go ahead and code it up — you’re drifting into Test-Driven Development. [...] [...] Pretty soon, you’re not keeping track of so much in your head at once, focusing on a little bit of functionality at a time, and then those spare brain cycles start thinking ahead, start coming up with those edge cases and error conditions you usually forget about. You start writing TODO comments in your tests to remind you to test those error and edge cases; pretty soon, you start writing those TODOs in the form of markTestIncomplete(). Then one day you’re adding one of those stub tests you mean to come back to later, when your brain jumps ahead to how to write the test. Before you’ve even implemented the thing it’s gonna test. So you go ahead and code it up — you’re drifting into Test-Driven Development. [...]

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