Exploring Test-Driven Development

In order to craft robust, maintainable, and scalable software applications, software development teams and stakeholders must make certain important decisions early in the software development process. These decision makers must adopt the software industry's tested and proven best practices and standards throughout the different stages of software development.

The quality of software projects can quickly degrade when developers build the code base using development approaches, coding styles, and practices that automatically make source code rigid and difficult to maintain. This chapter points out the habits and practices that result in writing bad code and should therefore be avoided. The programming habits, development styles, and approaches that should be learned to facilitate writing clean and maintainable code are explained.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Difficulty in maintaining code
• How bad code gets that way
• What we can do to prevent bad code
• The principles of test-driven development
• The test-driven development cycle