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Verification-First Development

Verification-First Development

1 comments

·March 18, 2025
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simonw

I'm all for splitting up the definitions of "test-first development" (TFD) and "test-driven development" (TDD), because I think for many forms of software development TFD is an anti-pattern that actively discourages people from writing tests.

Unfortunately this article appears to want to treat TDD as a sub-set of TFD. I'd like to redefine TDD to mean "you bundle tests with your implementation when you commit to source control" - where it doesn't matter if you wrote the tests before or after the implementation.

I write a lot of my tests after, often using snapshot testing. I get the key benefits of a robust test suite - protection against future changes introducing bugs that my test suite would have caught - but I don't go through the torment of trying to figure out how to test something that I've not yet even fully designed.