Why TDD Is the Best Bug Spray!
In a past life I was responsible for development, customer support, and quality control of some projects. This was 15 years ago and I don’t know if Drupal had great testing tools back then, but this project didn’t! By the end of the project, almost half of my time was spent checking and fixing issues where one change over here affected something over there.
It was like playing an endless game of whack-a-mole — fix one bug, and two more popped up. If that sounds familiar, it might be time to stop and invest in TDD.
One of the core ideas of TDD is that your tests are executable — they run every time, and they catch mistakes before your customers do. That’s how you stop playing whack-a-mole. On my test suites now, I typically run thousands of tests in minutes. I don’t know about you, but that’s faster than what I can do manually.
To fix bugs, and keep them fixed, you have only two options:
- Exponentially increase the amount of time you spend manually testing
- Have a good test suite that does it for you.
I know what I pick. What about you?
Tired of fixing the same bugs over and over? Let’s build the safety net your project deserves.
Just reply if you’re ready to take your codebase from good to great — without the whack-a-mole.