Introduction to Test Driven Development

From http://agiledata.org/essays/tdd.html:

Test-driven development (TDD) (Beck 2003; Astels 2003), is an evolutionary approach to development which combines test-first development where you write a test before you write just enough production code to fulfill that test and refactoring.

What is the primary goal of TDD?

One view is the goal of TDD is specification and not validation (Martin, Newkirk, and Kess 2003).  In other words, it’s one way to think through your requirements or design before your write your functional code (implying that TDD is both an important agile requirements and agile design technique). Another view is that TDD is a programming technique.  As Ron Jeffries likes to say, the goal of TDD is to write clean code that works. I think that there is merit in both arguments, although I lean towards the specification view, but I leave it for you to decide.