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InfoQ Homepage News Interview: Hakan Erdogmus on TDD Misunderstandings and Adoption Issues

Interview: Hakan Erdogmus on TDD Misunderstandings and Adoption Issues

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In this interview made during Agile 2007, Dr. Hakan Erdogmus, Editor in Chief of IEEE Software, discusses about Test Driven Development starting from a study done by Ron Jeffries and Grigori Melnik and published as "TDD--The Art of Fearless Programming" in the IEEE Software magazine. Hakan talks about current misunderstandings regarding TDD's role in software development and the adoption issues it faces.

According to Hakan, TDD is not always understood as a development technique, and is sometimes perceived as another QA testing procedure. Because of that misunderstanding, some managers avoid using TDD by their teams, considering they already have a testing procedure in place. Hakan explains that TDD was originally intended as a technique designed to improve development productivity rather than raising code quality which comes as a side effect.

Hakan also speaks about TDD adoption issues. There are good developers who resist adopting TDD. They are used with other development techniques, and are not interested in changing their programming habits. Another issue is the difficulty to practice TDD individually in a team that does not use it, because the unit tests are not going to keep up with the code changes done by other team members. Also, the management perceive TDD as an additional time consuming activity and does not require being used by their teams.

The entire interview is 21 minutes long.

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