Share |

Test Driven Development (TDD) is an automation testing approach to develop high quality product with minimum or negligible quality issues.  Having this approach implemented strategically results in reliability on the product until its retirement.   Initial investment on TDD approach will reap the great results in product maintenance phase and helps to obtain return on investments (ROI) seamlessly.

You might want to ask question, how TDD is different from traditional development methodology?

Unlike traditional or standard development process, in TDD approach, the testing will start at the early stages of the product development and validates the completed activities for the desired output.  Most importantly focus on quality starts at the beginning of the product development rather than at completion.  This gives opportunity to learn lessons quickly and apply best practices in subsequent implementations with the increased productivity.

What are the real challenges with the TDD approach?

• Define work breakdown structure and work breakdown dictionary;
• Define sequence of activities and identify critical path;
• Prepare realistic schedules;
• Prepare cost estimates;
• Getting budget approval.

You might be surprised with the above non-technical list.  Since developer needs to write automation test cases for the completed activities immediately, project manager should plan these efforts meticulously without disturbing the critical path.   Project manager might want to use schedule compression techniques by resource crashing or fast tracking to meet customer deadlines.  In either case, additional budget is required to implement the TDD approach.

Really there is no technical challenge to take up the TDD approach, because several open source tools honor this approach and provides technical support through online forums and blogs.   If you think about TDD, it appears like a unit testing approach, but it’s not!    Using unit testing tool, you can test a specific part of the code segment.  But in TDD, you can perform integration testing and business analysts can verify those test cases at the same time.

FIT and FitNesse are two open source tools allow us to apply TDD principles efficiently and improve communication with customers and business analysts. Framework for Integrated Testing (FIT) is an acceptance testing framework.  FIT improves the collaboration and allow customers and business analysts to write and verify tests.

Writing FIT tests require general programming knowledge. FitNesse is a web-based server, allowing easy collaboration. Business analysts and other non–technical people do not have to set up any software in order to use FitNesse. Any browser will do just fine.

You can find more information about Fitneese at http://fitnesse.org/.