Hi,

I participate in a TDD Coding Dojo, where we try to practice pure TDD on simple problems. It occured to me however that the code which emerges from the unit tests isn't the most efficient. Now this is fine most of the time, but what if the code usage grows so that efficiency becomes a problem.

I love the way the code emerges from unit testing, but is it possible to make the efficiency property emerge through further tests ?

Here is a trivial example in ruby: prime factorization. I followed a pure TDD approach making the tests pass one after the other validating my original acceptance test (commented at the bottom). What further steps could I take, if I wanted to make one of the generic prime factorization algorithms emerge ? To reduce the problem domain, let's say I want to get a quadratic sieve implementation ... Now in this precise case I know the "optimal algorithm, but in most cases, the client will simply add a requirement that the feature runs in less than "x" time for a given environment.

require 'shoulda'
require 'lib/prime'

class MathTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  context "The math module" do
    should "have a method to get primes" do 
      assert Math.respond_to? 'primes'
    end
  end
  context "The primes method of Math" do
    should "return [] for 0" do
      assert_equal [], Math.primes(0)
    end
    should "return [1] for 1 " do
      assert_equal [1], Math.primes(1)
    end
    should "return [1,2] for 2" do 
      assert_equal [1,2], Math.primes(2)
    end
    should "return [1,3] for 3" do 
      assert_equal [1,3], Math.primes(3)
    end
    should "return [1,2] for 4" do 
      assert_equal [1,2,2], Math.primes(4)
    end 
    should "return [1,5] for 5" do 
      assert_equal [1,5], Math.primes(5)
    end   
    should "return [1,2,3] for 6" do 
      assert_equal [1,2,3], Math.primes(6)
    end       
    should "return [1,3] for 9" do 
      assert_equal [1,3,3], Math.primes(9)
    end        
    should "return [1,2,5] for 10" do 
      assert_equal [1,2,5], Math.primes(10)
    end                  
  end
#  context "Functionnal Acceptance test 1" do
#    context "the prime factors of 14101980 are 1,2,2,3,5,61,3853"do      
#      should "return  [1,2,3,5,61,3853] for ${14101980*14101980}" do
#        assert_equal [1,2,2,3,5,61,3853], Math.primes(14101980*14101980)
#      end
#    end
#  end
end

and the naive algorithm I created by this approach

module Math
  def self.primes(n)
    if n==0
      return []
    else
      primes=[1]  
      for i in 2..n do
        if n%i==0          
          while(n%i==0)
            primes<<i
            n=n/i
          end
        end
      end      
      primes
    end
  end
end