On Thu, 9 Aug 2001, Stas Bekman wrote: > Some methods of extreme programming suggest writing tests even before > the code have been written
I tried this once, for the lexical parser in a desktop calculator program I wrote. It is a really liberating experience, and leads to greater experimentation. If you have tests for everything that can go wrong (this being the difficult bit), rather than saying "I think this change works: it doesn't _seem_ to break anything", you merely run the tests over it and _know_ that it hasn't broken anything.
