Adopting Test-Driven Development

I've mentioned several times in this book that I am an advocate of Test-Driven Development, or TDD. TDD means writing tests before writing feature code, and sticking to TDD is a proven way to generate high-quality and maintainable software.

But what is a section about TDD doing in an appendix of a book about using Python inside Autodesk Maya?

An instructional book is about growth. Both mine and yours. I hope that learning about the OpenMaya API will encourage your creativity. I hope that building a request-reply framework will increase your productivity. I hope that the several chapters we spent learning techniques towards building better code will grow you into a better programmer.

But all the growth and improvement the chapter topics can possibly inspire pales in comparison to what you can do if you adopt Test-Driven Development. It is the single most important technique you can use to make your programming life better (and an improved programming life...