This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Keith Ray. Original Post: Test-Driven is Faster Feed Title: MemoRanda Feed URL: http://homepage.mac.com/1/homepage404ErrorPage.html Feed Description: Keith Ray's notes to be remembered on agile software development, project management, oo programming, and other topics. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Keith Ray Latest Posts From MemoRanda

One point I forgot to make in my previous posting: TDD is faster than test-after and code-n-fix. In Test-Driven Development, testing is part of the design process, it doesn't take much time to write a small test that represents a part of your thinking about a problem. Test-after is slower because the traditional design/code process -- without tests -- takes about the same amount of time as the TDD design/code process, and then the traditional coding time is followed by writing tests that take even more time.

Also, test-driven code is less buggy than the usual results the from code-n-fix approach. Since bug-fixing by itself is a lot longer than the TDD process, code-n-fix with no automated tests is actually slower when you take coding-time + bug-fixing-time into account.

Unfortunately, there is an attitude in this industry that bugs are inevitable, so not much attention is paid to techniques that reduce the creation of bugs -- automated tests, code-reviews, or pair programming. Those of us interested in TDD are still the early-adopters.