It takes time to become proficient at test driven development. But it’s worth the investment. I’m not convinced it makes writing code faster because, after all, it does require you to write more code for the unit tests. However, I am convinced it makes writing production-ready code faster.
Coupled with continuous integration, TDD shortens the overall software development lifecycle because it absorbs the explicit non-coding phases of waterfall software development and makes them an implicit part of writing code. Through refactoring, analysis and design are unified to become a low-level, recurring activity, which also keeps code tidy and self-documenting. Writing unit tests first, helps design testability into the code, while maintaining a high test coverage helps locate and fix defects quickly and reduce the number of implementation defects.
