Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach

Having developers do TDD and Agile places an enormous pressure on them, as TDD mindset is difficult to get accustomed to. Many people strongly dislike it when they first approach it like this, and there are better strategies to do that. Introducing some of the Agile practices (stories, sprints) in conjunction with BDD to an ongoing project enables developers to notice their mistakes early on and buys them on the testing side. After they get familiar with the approach, and feeling comfortable running test suites, it’s much easier to get the same people who initially were reluctant to TDD to embrace the bottom-up design emerging from unit tests.