The recent rapid growth of the software testing UAE sector indicates that testing is as important as software development now. Companies now explore new, more effective testing approaches that begins right at the start of development and lasts throughout the cycle, thus ensuring a product that satisfies all client requirements. This also seems to be one of the main reasons why Agile is widely adopted, and why companies are going for Test-driven Development (TDD) approaches.

To effectively do TDD, they need to look at various factors. 

Understanding the concept first

Because there are many misconceptions around TDD and how it can be done properly, it’s best to understand the concept before doing it. TDD when done the wrong way can bring forth a lot of problems. While testing is about figuring out what could go wrong with the product and then preventing such scenarios, development is more about everything that has to happen for the product to deliver the promised results. 

TDD combines both these mindsets, and is not to be seen simply as a way of testing code. TDD should be about understanding behaviors in the system, and then creating tests that are relatively more resilient to changes. With such an understanding, developers would be able to build features that fulfill the acceptance criteria. The code will be less expensive to maintain while the design will be clear and extendable. Essentially, the testing is done on specific behavior rather than on units of a code. 

Testing untestable codes

TDD requires a plethora of skills and lots of knowledge so that the team can even test code that was deemed untestable. Many teams when using a service will have a client instantiate and then call that service, which is repeated across the system multiple times. This ends up making the system a big puzzle of stuffed code that is too consuming or borderline impossible to test independently. 

Only a very few software development companies in Dubai refrain from this practice. They use dependency injection instead, which basically injects dependencies automatically using injection frameworks. This way instantiation of a service can be done by a different object which would then be shared to the client when required. The solution also makes testing the code’s interaction with external dependencies easier. 

Hands-on experience

To master TDD, the team certainly should be able to write good behavior tests and testable codes. But that’s not all. TDD can only be effectively done if the team has hands-on experience in doing it. Developers need to see for themselves how fast their tests catch problems in a TDD environment, and how the practice made their code better. 

To conclude, TDD is not something a team can do successfully in one go any day. Even if they have all the knowledge, adopting the approach itself may not look very feasible. They will need hands-on practice to actually get it done properly. TDD can grant a lot of benefits for a business, especially for an Agile software development company.