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Sunday, January 11, 2004

Test Driven Development

Jarno Virtanen writes...

My personal gripe about test-driven development is the complete lack of the so-called white box testing methods. In white box testing, you use the source code in order to create test cases that cover the whole functionality of the testable unit. I would go so far as to claim that the trickiest bugs are in the edge- and corner-cases of the code which you can reveal with white box testing. But, of course, tests in advance of coding are better than no tests at all. (I am too often guilty of writing no tests at all.)

I think it is important to emphasize that test-driven design does not imply that the tests you write toward a design are not necessarily the only tests you should write to get to a production quality release. The TDD tests should be just enough to get to a satisfactory design. Depending on the system being constructed, you should still consider acceptance tests, including performance tests and more complete suites for functional coverage than were needed just for the design process.

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.