Introduce unit testing when codebase is already available

Posted by McMannus on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by McMannus
Published on 2012-09-28T08:50:48Z Indexed on 2012/09/28 9:49 UTC
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unit-testing

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TDD

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refactoring

I've been working on a project in Flex for three years now without unit testing. The simple reason for that is the fact that I just didn't realize the importance of unit testing when being at the beginning of studies at university. Now my attitude towards testing changed completely and therefore I want to introduce it to the existing project (about 25000LOC).

In order to do it, there are two approaches to choose from:

1) Discard the existing codebase and start from scratch with TDD
2) Write the tests and try to make them pass by changing the existing code

Well, I would appreciate not having to write everything from scratch but I think by doing this, the design would be much better.

What would you advise me to do?

Thanks for replies in advance!
Jan

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