I've been a big believer in unit testing for years now, but was never serious about test-driven development (TDD) until a few months ago. It sounded like an interesting idea, but I didn't understand why TDD practitioner were so zealous about writing the tests first. Why did it matter? I thought it was to ensure that some project manager doesn't try to shave some time off the project by cutting the unit tests. Then I started doing some reading about TDD, poking around, asking questions, and trying it out myself. I discovered the real reason for writing tests first is that TDD isn't about testing code, it's about designing code.

Author: James Kovacs
Blogged: September 9, 2006