Test Driven Development

For the past few months I have had to write C code. As some readers of this blog would know, for the past decade I have been preaching, or to use a more polite term - evangelizing, a great deal about software process and about coding practices. All of what I preached was from books that I read. What I read had enlightened me as to the mistakes I had when I was coding over the preceding decade.

The code has to be in C. I wanted to do test driven development. When I had tried to introduce unit testing in our compiler work at acmet, a major problem was the non-availability of a suitable C unit testing tool. This time around I came across the book Test Driven Development for Embedded C. It describes the use of CppUTest. I have gone through about half the book. That is sufficient for my present requirement. All the code that I am now writing is test driven.

A few weeks ago, I had to provide code for a small problem posed by one of our development teams. I found refactoring my code to create the needed modules much less of a problem than I had imagined. I could not have done it quite that easily had I not had the units tests. The discipline of TDD I found leads to far easier and better modularization. I could with full confidence hand over the modules to the concerned team.

For those doing embedded systems programming in C, I strongly recommend adopting the methods described in the book