Lumenovis

I’m currently working on a large (multi-quarter) project for a large telecommunications client to produce a very stable and high-performing communications middleware component.  Throughout the project I’ve been a big advocate of test driven development (TDD), and as we approach the end of the project our decision to adopt TDD practices is paying off on a daily basis.  I’ve already lost count of the number of times our automated testing has caught “oops” bugs resulting from unintended consequences of unrelated code changes and bug fixes.  I wish I would have tracked the time, but my guess is we’ve saved ourselves 3-6 man months of painful debugging vs. perhaps a total of a couple of man weeks of test case development.   A multi-month savings, even on a multi-man-year project, is no trivial thing.  As an added bonus, I’m very confident that our release 1 product will be far higher quality than it would have been without a TDD approach.

Test early.  Test often.  Be happy.