Succeeding with Agile

Test-Driven Development

If you were to look at how programmers write code on a traditional development team, you would find that they typically select a portion of the program to tackle, write the code, attempt to compile it, fix all the compile errors, walk through the code in a debugger, and then repeat. This is summarized in Figure 9.1. This process is very different from a test-driven approach, which is also shown in that figure. A programmer doing test-driven development works in very short cycles of identifying and automating a failing test, writing just enough code to pass that test, and then cleaning the code up in any necessary ways before starting again. This cycle is repeated every few minutes, rather than every few hours.

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