Test Driven Development
Do your developers do a good job of unit testing? Are you sure?
Picture this scenario… You work for weeks or months on a new release. Your test team finds bugs, but you fix them. You release the product. You celebrate (as well you should). But then your mission critical device or software starts to mysteriously lock up or restart in the field. The customer support calls are pouring in. Your VP of sales is livid. How did we miss a bug that bad?
The hard truth is that some bugs are almost impossible to discover – or even reproduce – in the lab. Those dreaded memory tramplers or time bombs love to hide until they can make their debut on the big stage. These are the kinds of bugs we want to find in unit testing.
But it is the low-level test automation made possible by TDD that may offer the greatest return on your investment. In our experience, tests automated at the unit level live longer, are easier to maintain, and are much more likely to find bugs long after they’re written than tests automated at the GUI level. If you’re even remotely considering spending money on test automation, you owe it to yourself to look into TDD.
No danger of hidden bugs slipping through your test team? Unlimited budget for automation? Then you probably don’t need to call us.
If you’d like to get more bang for your automation buck and sleep better after your next release, let’s talk about TDD.