software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term ' ...

, tester-driven development, or bug-driven development, is an

anti-pattern An anti-pattern in software engineering, project management, and business processes is a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive. The term, coined in 1995 by computer programmer An ...

where the

requirement In product development and process optimization, a requirement is a singular documented physical or functional need that a particular design, product or process aims to satisfy. It is commonly used in a formal sense in engineering design, incl ...

s are determined by

bug report A bug tracking system or defect tracking system is a software application that keeps track of reported software bugs in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system. Many bug tracking systems, such as those ...

s or

test Test(s), testing, or TEST may refer to: * Test (assessment), an educational assessment intended to measure the respondents' knowledge or other abilities Arts and entertainment * ''Test'' (2013 film), an American film * ''Test'' (2014 film), ...

results rather than, for example, the value or cost of a

feature Feature may refer to: Computing * Feature (CAD), could be a hole, pocket, or notch * Feature (computer vision), could be an edge, corner or blob * Feature (software design) is an intentional distinguishing characteristic of a software item ...

. The concept is generally invoked facetiously, and comes with the implication that high volumes of computer code are written with little regard for

unit testing In computer programming, unit testing is a software testing method by which individual units of source code—sets of one or more computer program modules together with associated control data, usage procedures, and operating procedures&m ...

by the programmers. The term itself is a tongue-in-cheek reference to

test-driven development Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process relying on software requirements being converted to test cases before software is fully developed, and tracking all software development by repeatedly testing the software against a ...

, a widely used methodology in agile software practices. In test-driven development tests are used to drive the implementation towards fulfilling the requirements. Tester-driven development instead shortcuts the process by removing the determination of requirements and letting the testers (or the QA team) drive what they think the software should be through the testing (or QA) process.

Project A project is any undertaking, carried out individually or collaboratively and possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular goal. An alternative view sees a project managerially as a sequence of even ...

s that are developed using this anti-pattern often suffer from being extremely late. Another common problem is poor

code quality In the context of software engineering, software quality refers to two related but distinct notions: * Software functional quality reflects how well it complies with or conforms to a given design, based on functional requirements or specificatio ...

. Common causes for projects ending up being run this way are often: *The testing phase started too early; *Incomplete requirements; *Inexperienced testers; *Inexperienced developers; *Poor

project management Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. T ...

. Things get worse when the testers realize that they don't know what the requirements are and therefore don't know how to test any particular code changes. The onus then falls on the developers of individual changes to write their own test cases and they are happy to do so because their own tests normally pass and their performance measurements improve. Project leaders are also delighted by the rapid reduction in the number of open change requests.

References

Software development process Anti-patterns {{Software-eng-stub

See also

References