Imagine if the tools existed that made your work more efficient, consistently reducing mistakes, increasing productivity, saving your company money and consistently improving the quality of your products. In their 2008 book The Art of Agile Development authors James Shore and Shane Warden wrote:

“Wouldn't it be cool if there was a tool that alerted you to programming mistakes moments after you made them—a tool so powerful that it virtually eliminated the need for debugging? There is such a tool—or rather, a technique. It's test-driven development (TDD), and it actually delivers these results.”

We know it works because it's the exact technique we use at PROLIN to develop our products. It's a 'test-as-you-go' method that greatly influences the design of our products and allows for faster development cycles with dramatically reduced defects.

But back in the 70's when a 'reel-to'reel' tape drive was a luxury and most people had punch cards software testing was a painstaking, time consuming process - as recounted in Matthew Huesser's recent article (click to read) 'Rethinking software development, testing and inspection.'Paradigm shifts fuel the speed of business and the rush to the cloud is impacting every aspect of the enterprise, including software development and testing. Crowd sourcing begets crowd testing and software as a service (Saas) opens the doors to testing tools as a service (TTaas). Unfortunately many businesses are still dependent on legacy systems constructed on old architectures - platforms not well suited to the numerous advantages that TDD or cloud based testing services provide.

Read more: Feet on the ground

Bob Sterling