I would say, don't look at it from a time angle, the real benefits are tests for all code written (only useful if tests are good) and the quality of design as thinking about how you can check something is right before you have something to test means you must consider what you will write more carefully and in more detail.
I don't quite know how the idea of having someone writing the tests and someone writing the product code would work in TDD, for the simple reason you must write the test before you write the code and then you look to refactor the code afterwards to try and make it simpler and this may involve refactoring the tests. I think writing tests and writing product code become one activity in TDD.
One of the risks I think which would be faced by splitting test writing and product code writing would be that if those writing product code get ahead of those writing tests, either you have people sitting around twiddling thumbs or you have product code written before tests and so break from TDD and may be loose the tests from that code.
Michael Whapples On 08/12/10 20:08, John J. Boyer wrote:
Good points. I'm sending a blind copy of this correspondence to the brailleblaster list for those who aren't also on this one. Is anyone interested in concentrating on writing the tests? On Wed, Dec 08, 2010 at 09:39:14AM -0800, Chris von See wrote:Using TDD will lengthen the development timeline a bit since you'll be writing both product code and test code (plus you may be maintaining the tests from time to time if/when your functional specification changes) but it will significantly shorten the debugging process since you'll be able to more readily debug individual portions of the code and you'll catch and localize functional regressions much more quickly. If you can find people that can focus on writing the tests themselves while others write the actual code in parallel you may be able to capture back some of that time... Cheers Chris On Dec 7, 2010, at 9:45 PM, John J. Boyer wrote:I think some on this list may be familiar with this technique. The subject has recently come up on the brailleblaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx list. Will this approach significantly shorten the time to getting a usable application? Thanks, John -- John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer Abilitiessoft, Inc. http://www.abilitiessoft.com Madison, Wisconsin USA Developing software for people with disabilities For a description of the software, to download it and links to project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.comFor a description of the software, to download it and links to project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com
