Can Test Driven Development (TDD) work for data-oriented development?

Today the test driven development is quite a familiar concept among the developers and testers in the field of software engineering and technology and so is the data oriented development. 

Data oriented development is commonly known as the object oriented development. We have taken up an important question in this article which is “can test driven development work for data oriented development?”

But before answering this question we shall discuss about the two different developments involved in the question individually so that the understanding of the answer becomes easy. 

About Test Driven Development

First let us discuss about the test driven development. The test driven development as the term itself suggests is based up on carrying out the development process with the help of short development cycles that include the following steps:

1. Addition of a test: The development begins with the creation of test cases for all the features.
2. Execution of all tests in order to check the working of the new one.
3. Production of code implementing which the code can only pass the test and does not incorporates any new functionality.
4. Execution of the automated tests and observing their success.
5. Re-factoring or cleaning up of the code
6. Repetition of the whole cycle for the improvement of the functionalities.

Many development styles have been developed for the test driven development few of which are mentioned below:

1. YAGNI (you ain’t gonna need it),
2. KISS (keep it simple stupid),
3. Fake it till you make it and so on.

About Data Oriented Development

- It makes use of the models that are developed around the real world concepts.

- This development methodology involves the incorporation of the data behavior as well as the structure. 

- The process starts from the quantization of the data in to small distinguishable and discrete entities which are known as the “objects”. 

- Each of the objects created have their own inherent and unique identity. 

- Other characteristics of the data oriented development aare:

1. Classification
2. Inheritance
3. Polymorphism

- The essence of the object oriented development lies in the organization and identification of the application concepts.

- The primary focus lies with the analysis and design phases. 

- The data oriented development is known for encouraging the software developers to work and think. 

- This can be thought of as a conceptual process independent of a programming language. 

- The methodology here is to build the software model and add details to it during the design. 

- It consists of the following steps:

1. System conception
2. Analysis
3. System design
4. Class design and
5. Implementation

Can TDD work for Data Oriented Development

Now coming to our question, the answer is yes test driven development can absolutely work for the data oriented development since it has many characteristics and benefits that can be successfully incorporated in to the data oriented development:

1. Predictability: With the test driven development it is easy to predict that when the development process if finished since all the tests that they have are passed by the code.

2. Learning: With the test driven development the developers get a better understanding of the code and hence it becomes easier to develop the code that models the real world very well.

3. Reliability: Moreover the test driven development makes the data oriented development more reliable since it has a suite of regressions tests that cover all of the system aspects.

4. Speed: With the test driven development the data oriented development can be speeded up since a little time is spent debugging and mistakes are sought very soon.

5. Confidence

6. Cost

7. Scope limiting

8. Manageability

9. Documentation