Beyond Legacy Code

Don’t Spend Money You Don’t Have To

There are many little mistakes that we make simply because we’re human. But when we make a little mistake in the hyper-literal world of the computer, it can turn into a big mistake. Computers don’t know what you meant to do. They aren’t interpreting or translating, or taking code as suggestions or guidelines—they’re blindly following very specific instructions. So when you build in the specific instruction to make sure this is working, and test it constantly as you go, you can—surprisingly often—just backspace and fix any bug instantly and then move on. A few seconds have gone by.

But on many software development teams, Agile or otherwise, that don’t practice TDD and instead rely on a separate QA process that ...