Within the programming world there are several methodologies that should be included during the software development life cycle and one of the most common practices or recommended by developers, is the Test Driven Development or also known as TDD aimed at optimizing the strategy carried out during a project.
What is Test Driven Development?
Test driven development (TDD) is a programming approach used during software development in which unit tests are performed before writing the code. Basically, the objective is to make a clean, robust and simple code, for this, it is necessary to first create test cases for each functionality to be developed, it is tested, and in case of detecting any failure, a code free of errors is rewritten.
In this way, it is intended that the development becomes faster (regardless of what you may think initially by the time allocated for this purpose), Why? Basically because the TDD approach aims to eliminate code duplication and let developers only write new code in case tests fail, correcting the countless errors that may occur in thousands of lines of code, in addition to generating a much more transparent documentation and consequently creating a safety net against any modification.
How is a TDD different from other programming tests?
There are many types of software testing, because each one tries to cover a series of requirements and needs in which we can find ourselves: acceptance test, integration test, usability, etc.. However, the main characteristic that defines TDD VS others is that it is based on tests that guide the process and are not performed at a later time.
What are the phases of a TDD?
Performing a Test Driven Development process consists of 3 phases:
- Test Development and Test Writing: In this step, the developer must clearly define the requirements that will be carried out to complete the writing of the code and that will be used to code and validate the different tests to be performed. As a rule, this writing process will contain errors because the implementation necessary for validation has not yet been done. It is also known as the red phase because the errors recorded will be shown with this color.
- Test validation: Once the established tests have been validated we can say that the established requirements are met. During this phase no best practices are contemplated, but simply verifies that the proposed tests are met, that is why it is known as green phase because this color is the most representative for this process.
- Refactoring: In this part, the written code will be reviewed in order to verify that it complies with the good practices and to verify that the code is clean.
10 advantages of Test Driven Development
- Error Reduction
- Detection of unspecified requirements
- Elimination of duplicate code
- Lower maintenance cost
- Reduced redundancy
- Increased productivity
- Increased documentation
- Agile methodology enhancement
- Production scalability
- Code quality
Why work with a TDD approach in your project?
Test Driven Development is an approach that, applied in a precise way, becomes a practice that covers the entire development cycle and especially the part that refers to software design, (in fact, for many TDD should be Test Driven Design) allowing to work on application development projects from scratch, short and long term or projects focused on functionalities, the reasons?
Because a TDD allows to obtain a higher quality software where everything is tested and the fulfillment of customer requirements is perceived with greater satisfaction in a bidirectional way to ensure proper performance.