ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on reducing the costs indirectly by preventing defects, making the defect fixing cycles faster, and by improving the development process in a responsible, sustainable way as a whole. It explains the technical basics in a generalized and simplified manner and concentrate on the cost-saving aspect in more detail. Test-driven development (TDD), is a development approach introduced by Kent Beck in the late 1990s. In TDD, the functional requirements of a particular code module are defined first and then the actual module is developed to meet those requirements. TDD requires constant refactoring to make the code as clean and as elegant as possible, before anything is passed on to testing. The chapter analyses some simple approaches and practices that can effectively be utilized to help make a team’s work more effective and reduce the costs related to defects as a positive side effect.
