Jeff Key

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XP results in fewer defects

Fowler discusses his experience with very few defects on projects utilizing extreme programming.  This shouldn't surprise anyone doing test driven development, as the benefits are obvious from day one, especially when starting with a clean slate. 

I've been doing TDD for a while on things I've worked on myself, particularly libraries, but only recently have I been involved in a project where the entire thing is being done in a test-first manner.  The results are phenomenal and productivity is definitely improved.  TDD can be a tough sell since writing the testing code can eat up a good chunk of development time, particularly early in the development lifecycle when people want to see results, but the time is easily recouped as the project progresses and bugs that would otherwise go unnoticed cause tests to fail, resulting in a quick resolution. 

I've always said that .NET made programming fun again and with things like patterns, TDD, refactoring and the like it just keeps getting better.  Happiness!

Posted: Jan 28 2004, 07:33 PM by jeffreykey | with 1 comment(s)
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Joseph E Shook said:

Recently I proved this scenario out myself using NUnit. I had previously used Nunit but many times it was bolted on after the GUI was well on its way. I was the only developer on a web based user admin so I basically said my GUI will be NUnit and I wrote my tests firsts. With tests running green against my facade layer, I moved on to the creations of my aspx pages. To my surprise this process went amazingly fast because a lot of the thought process and the code need for hooking GUI to Facade, was in my unit tests. I new the pay back near the end of the project would be there, but I didn't realize the transition form unit tests to GUI were going to be so fast and smooth.
# January 29, 2004 5:15 PM