Yes, I am going to bring this up. Plenty of people have latched onto the idea that testing code helps make code better. A lot of people even believe that it makes the process of writing the code faster. I see a lot of people who are reluctant still to use test driven development. I know I am throwing around a buzzword… or maybe I mean buzzphrase since that’s actually three words.

I don’t plan on doing TDD justice here since I am trying to keep these tips relatively short. I just hope this is enough to inspire people to go read, learn more, and try some test driven development. I am going to give some quick reasons why developers testing their code should write the tests first.

·         You will not want to go back and write it later. Sometimes you are going to go back and write the tests for the code you have already written, but what happens if you decide you’re going to write a lot of code and then go back and add the tests. Now you’re talking about a lot of testing all at once. There is a good chance you’ll cut corners and maybe skip entire aspects of the testing. I know I would be tempted.

·         How do you know what kind of interface your new code needs if you’ve never used it? If you start by trying to use some code that does not exist yet, you’ll be deciding how you would want to use it. Now you’re probably thinking you could do that anyway. If you write code to use some new feature you will know the design is easy to use and work with. You just made it up and used it in the test. If you didn’t write the test you had to guess what interface you will want later.