April 8, 2011
Another fringe benefit of TDD which has fallen somewhat by the wayside, in my opinion, is the notion that the tests can double as the documentation—documentation which, by its nature, can never fall out of sync with the source code. This feature of TDD was a Big Deal back when I was first getting into open source; it was very popular to reply “just read the tests” in response to the question “where is the documentation”, and this was a novel change from the heavyweight documentation which had up until then been considered one of the requisites of software development.
(Full Story: RSpec is for the literate)
