I've been listening to my favourite podcasts, HanselMinutes and .NetRocks, as usual and I've stumbled upon another gem of a show. It was about Test Driven Development. Why am I talking so much about this, although I don't practice it? Because I am sure I will get around and do practice it. It is not just a hype, it is the only way to do software. And I will explain why. But before that, let's talk about a confusion that has been cleared by the show I have been talking about.

The name Test Driven Development is usually associated with Automated Unit Testing. While this is mostly used only in TDD, it is not required by TDD at all. The badly chosen word Test actually means "meaningful, measurable, goals", in other words, the specifications! If you have those, you can test your application against the requirements and determine what is wrong, if anything. Without a clear view of the specs, you cannot tell if the project is performing as needed.

So if you think about TDD as Specifications Driven Development, you realize that you have been doing it all along! Admittedly, now it sounds even more like STD, but hey, sacrifices must be done in the name of improving code blog readability.

Now, I was saying that this is the only way to do software. Actually, I have explained why just above, but I will get into some personal details. I have been "blessed" with a project where the deadline was set before the specifications were drawn. Worse even, the specs did not come from people that really understand the business process, but from people using another piece of software that they want replaced. In other words, we're pretty much inventing ways of porting a badly designed Windows desktop app into ASP.Net. As this wasn't enough, we are also inventing features that were badly described by the client and starting from a partially functional ASP.Net project written by junior programmers.

What a drag! But that was actually not so bad as realizing that my developer output was slow, bad, and overall smelly and ugly. Why was that? Why couldn't I just stop whining and do what I know had to be done? Because there were no specs!. Without clearly drawn specs of not only what I had to do, but also what the initial project was supposed to do, my hands were tied. I could not refactor the code, because I had no way of telling if I broke anything. Has it ever happened to you to take a piece of code, make it better, then realize it is not working and you don't know why? The fear of that happening is the most important reason why people don't refactor. The next important factor being a manager that thinks refactoring is just a waste of time and has no vision of the future of the project.

But also, having no vision of what is to be done is the reason why developers are not motivated to do their job. Even the lowliest code monkey has to have a glimpse of the future of what they are doing, otherwise they are literally flying blind. Software development is just as much of an art as web design. It is actually strange that people don't understand there are many types of art just as there are many types of scientific thought. Even if we don't actually care how the app is gonna look as long as it does the job, we do feel pride in its functionality and it is nothing that hurts more as not knowing what that software is supposed to do and a clear way of measuring our own performance.

OK, enough of this. The bottom line is that a project needs to have clear specifications. The first test for a software is the compiler! You can even call it an automated test! ...but the last test is running through the spec list and determining if it does the job as required. Another podcast said that the process of creating automated tests has as a side effect the significant improvement of software quality, but not because of the tests themselves, but of the process of designing the tests. If your tests are meaningful, then you know what the app is to do and you have a clear vision of what failure and success mean and in the process of test design, you get to ask yourself the questions that lead to understanding the project. THAT is Test Driven Development!

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