3 Rules for TDD

I couldn’t help but share this. There couldn’t be a better way to summarize the unwritten rules of TDD, than the one wrote by Uncle Bob in his famous book ‘Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C#”.

• Don’t write any production code until you have written a failing unit test.
• Don’t write more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail or fail to compile.
• Don’t write any more production code than is sufficient to pass the failing test.

What it emphasises is when to switch between writing Unit Test and Production code, a key point, atleast according to me, for many times I see developers who try to think and build way too many test cases than what is actually needed. Honestly, yours truly too has been guilty of so called BDUF for Unit Test.

Uncle Bob, in formulating the 3 basic rules, emphasis that one needn’t write a unit test no more than when it fails or fails to compile, after which the developer proceeds to write the minimum code required to pass the test case. This short cycles would help the developer adopt the TDD approach in a better way.

Thanks Uncle Bob.