Chapter 17

Behavior-Driven Development

The causes of defects lie in worker errors, and defects are the results of neglecting those errors. It follows that mistakes will not turn into defects if worker errors are discovered and eliminated beforehand.

– Shiego Shingo

I was still in Italy the first time I was responsible for the development of a very important project for a successful startup. The company wanted to improve their systems in terms of scaling. They had an old system written in Visual Basic (VB), which wasn't optimized for the always-increasing volume of items coming into the warehouse.

This was when.NET Framework had just come out, and the startup wanted to replace their old system. However, the most exciting aspect was that the scope wasn't limited to a simple code rewrite. The software was meant to generate data from a manual operation of cataloging real items. The company was aware that the process needed improving as well, so...