Test driven development is an important method of developing which is based on first writing a test for what you want your program to do, this test will fail as you do not have any code written in orde for the test to pass but you then write the code which is necessary for the test to pass and then you continue repeating this process of writing a test then writing the code for said test to pass. You are encouraged to write the simplest possible code in order to make your test pass before moving on to the next test but you may need to do some refactoring between tests in order to ensure you do not have unused code, confusing methods or variables, etc. Test driven development is very helpful when it comes to testing the specifications of a system as you can write simple unit tests which would pass if a specification was met and when it fails you know that you still must add or change your code in order to make sure the specification was met for the end product. Other types of testing are also important to perform but test driven development can help you steer away from over complicated code and make sure that you do not have recurring duplication present when you regularly refactor between cycles.
I found this article to be particularly helpful when researching test driven development as it clearly breaks down the steps of test driven development in order for the reader to fully understand the process you must go through in order to follow this development method. Along with the thoroughly explained process this article also compares and shows how both acceptance test driven development and developer test driven development work together. As we just started working with test driven development in class I found this article to provide valuable insight into the definition and process of this testing/development model as it is something rather different compared to what we have worked on previously regarding testing as we usually have worked with code that needed tests written and not with tests that needed code to be written. Being new to TDD made it seem very confusing at first as it did not feel right to be writing the tests for code which did not even exist yet but the benefits of TDD are much easier to understand once you put this method into practice.
Dylan Brown Computer Science 