I have spent most of this week in Rational Unified Process (RUP) training, presented by the Ivar Jacobson International company. The training was engaging in that there were several opportunities for group discussion and hands-on exercises.
During a class discussion it was stated by the teacher that within the old waterfall lifecycle approach, when the project was nearing the production release date, testing was the portion of the project that got squeezed out due to a looming deadline. The discussion then moved to the fact that within the phases of RUP, iterative style development insures that testing for that particular iteration is done and not affected by timeline pressures.
When the instructor stated that, I quickly considered past situations within development iterations where testing time still got "squeezed" because of the various pressures to move to the next iteration. Because I know the value of the Test Driven Development (TDD) methodology I thought, what if, within the RUP phase iterations, TDD was utilized?
First, the TDD methodology could ensure that the developer tests are passing and that code coverage is almost complete. In addition, TDD would make certain that the code is refactored and ready for the next development iteration. TDD could also provide a living artifact to demonstrate to the stakeholders of the project that the entire bank of developer tests is passing. (You TDDers know the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you see the green bar of tools like JUnit or NUnit.) Finally, the tests provide a quick and automated regression testing mechanism when any changes are made to code base in future iterations.
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