213: Test-Driven Development for Software Design

TDD and Refactoring relationship with system's design

Thank you for reading Snippets of Text. Snippets from media about tech, programming, parenting, and more. This is a preview of a post available exclusively to paying subscribers. You can get unlimited access to all articles by purchasing a subscription.

Unrelated: Designing Maintainable and Flexible Software

Only some applications are pleasant to work on, especially those that are difficult to change. It emphasizes flexibility over perfection and is not concerned with acquiring ideals. Confident designers take the ambiguity of an object's class. Objects in a system can be composed in different ways depending on the context. When working on a code base, time is often limited due to management and company demand to deliver features and solve customer problems. To improve an old code base, it's essential to identify these areas and have specific strategies for dealing with Technical Debt. 

Design should focus on flexibility over aesthetics. Premature decisions about application structure should be avoided. Decisions should be made based on business relevance. Good design techniques, not personal preference, should be used. Refactoring can provide insights into a problem. Apply refactoring before adding new features to the code base. 

When designing software, it's essential to listen to feedback. Friction is an excellent indicator that improvements need to be made. If a design is causing difficulties for the development team, it's trying to tell you something important is missing. There are many signs that a design may need to be more flexible, but the most practical and obvious is the difficulty of testing an object. This is often a sign of coupling. It's essential to remain open to design insights during the coding process. 

Off Topic: Test-Driven Development for Software Design

Test-Driven Development is an exploration tool. The practice is a discovery tool because it provides an environment for fast experimentation. Thus the fundamental purpose of TDD is to aid in acquiring immediate feedback. A fast test suite enables an environment to refactor and try experimental designs. Fast tests increase the ability to evolve a design towards something more flexible.

Thanks for taking a look at the free preview of Snippets of Text. Please consider subscribing to the paid version if you find my work helpful. This way, I can spend more time developing new ideas to share with you.