I started working as a Unix sysadmin in 1996, and while I have always written programs, and have been doing so more heavily lately, I never wrote a program with someone else before. All of my programming has either been programs completely written by me, or small patches sent to existing open source projects. The purpose of testing aside from the most rudimentary always eluded me.
A few months ago I wrote my first program along with a good, professional programmer. I would code, he would code, I would code. He was good, but I noticed some of his changes would break my code. It occurred to me that testing is something of a communication device. I create functionality, I implement the test, then I tell other commiters to run the test suite before commiting code. If the tests do not complete, they know their code will break functionality I made.
I guess this is obvious, but when I read top reasons to do TDD etc. it is usually not mentioned as a prominent reason to do testing, if it is mentioned at all. I do not find tests beyond the most simple kind helpful in my code, but it starts becoming more useful when you have other people modifying the code.
I started working as a Unix sysadmin in 1996, and while I have always written programs, and have been doing so more heavily lately, I never wrote a program with someone else before. All of my programming has either been programs completely written by me, or small patches sent to existing open source projects. The purpose of testing aside from the most rudimentary always eluded me.
A few months ago I wrote my first program along with a good, professional programmer. I would code, he would code, I would code. He was good, but I noticed some of his changes would break my code. It occurred to me that testing is something of a communication device. I create functionality, I implement the test, then I tell other commiters to run the test suite before commiting code. If the tests do not complete, they know their code will break functionality I made.
I guess this is obvious, but when I read top reasons to do TDD etc. it is usually not mentioned as a prominent reason to do testing, if it is mentioned at all. I do not find tests beyond the most simple kind helpful in my code, but it starts becoming more useful when you have other people modifying the code.