George Dinwiddie told me a wonderful story at the AYE Conference last night. He was working with a group of developers at a company with several development groups. He coached them in implementing test-driven development and unit testing, and he emphasized to the programmers the importance of delivering well-tested code to the system testers. The results were impressive. The testers found dramatically fewer problems than usual—only one bug that was classified as high severity by the project owners, and other than that the product was given a clean bill of health.
You might think that the other programmers in the company would have been impressed—but you’d been sadly mistaken. The other programmers said,
“Hey, no fair! They tested ahead of time!“
Well, uh… yeah.