Risks Associated with Delayed Testing in TDD
Analyze the drawbacks of postponing testing in TDD and discover its impact on code quality, design influence, and overall project success.
An alternative approach to writing tests before code is to write code first, then write tests. This lesson compares and contrasts writing tests after the code with writing tests before the code.
Test it later
One approach to writing tests involves writing chunks of code and then retrofitting tests to those pieces of code. It’s an approach that’s used in commercial programming, and the workflow can be illustrated as follows:
Upon selecting a user story to develop, one or more pieces of production code are written. Tests follow! Academic research seems mixed, to say the least, on whether or not test-after differs from test-first. From one 2014 study by the ACM, an extract from the conclusion was this:
“...static code analysis results were found statistically significant in the favor of TDD. Moreover, the results of the survey revealed that the majority of developers in the experiment prefer
over TDD, given the lesser required level of learning curve.” TLD Test-last development
However, a commenter pointed out that in this research, the following applied:
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