Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests

Chapter 21. Test Readability

To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.

—Milton Glaser

Introduction

Teams that adopt TDD usually see an early boost in productivity because the tests let them add features with confidence and catch errors immediately. For some teams, the pace then slows down as the tests themselves become a maintenance burden. For TDD to be sustainable, the tests must do more than verify the behavior of the code; they must also express that behavior clearly—they must be readable. This matters for the same reason that code readability matters: every time the developers have to stop and puzzle through a test to figure out what it means, they have less time left to spend on creating new features, ...