Agile testing and test driven development

I came across an interesting article on Builder.com. As a taster:

"Agile development methodologies are beginning to drive the idea of test driven development into the consciousness of developers and development managers. Test driven development, in a nutshell, means writing your test cases first. First you decide what the module or object that you're working on should do and then you write tests which test whether that functionality works as you envisioned it—even before creating the object itself.

The net effect on the software development project is that less of the formal construction phase is invested on truly developing the code, and more time is invested in developing testing constructs. The back end formalized testing further reduces the overall construction phase of the project.

Test driven development advocates argue, somewhat successfully, that the additional time spent on testing reduces the overall amount of time necessary to construct the software because fewer bugs or unimplemented features go on to be undiscovered until late in the process – when it is known that bugs are more costly to fix."

For the full article visit builder.com