From: "Clinton D. Judy" <cdj@...>
Date: 2008-08-16T05:10:26+09:00
Subject: BDD and TDD - What are they for?

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I'd like someone to give me very basic reasons for why I need Behavior
Driven Development (BDD, see RSpec) and/or Test Driven Development (TDD,
See Test::Unit).

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I'm a fairly competent programmer. I think I use what they call an
"iterative" style of programming; I don't rush out to build the entire
program at once. I do a very small framework, then attempt to run it and
see if it's giving me the result I expect. If it's not, then I figure
out what's going wrong, and attempt to solve it before going on to the
next small part. You could say I do several iterations in an hour, to
give an idea of time.

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It looks like TDD does exactly what I'm doing, but introduces far more
code to the equation. One of the biggest features of TDD is being able
to run a suite of tests to make sure new features don't break old
features. Yet I have an eye for this while developing; I either fix the
upcoming problem because I know it's going to happen, or I'm doing it
wrong in the first place. Sure, I occasionally miss, but who doesn't? I
find the issue as quickly as I can and resolve it in a clean style.

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BDD looks like a way to make it easy for non-programmers to do
programming, but not having people keep several functions in mind at any
one time. And it also does TDD? Am I close?

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But everyone continually praises TDD and BDD, which leads me to believe
I'm missing something profound that could make me a better programmer.
So what's the big deal?

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Clinton Judy

Web Developer

Glenn O. Hawbaker, Inc.

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