--- title: "Test Driven Development proves useful at Microsoft" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2005/2/26/test-driven-development-proves-useful-at-microsoft.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2005/2/26/test-driven-development-proves-useful-at-microsoft.html" published: "2005-02-26T22:50:00" updated: "2005-02-26T22:50:00" tags: ["Agile Related"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "One of the coolest things I got to find out today from the PM of the MSBuild product, Kieran Mockford, is that development on the next version of MSBuild has been done using Test Driven Development. Yep, Write a test…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Test Driven Development proves useful at Microsoft By Roy Osherove February 26, 2005 In [Agile Related](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile-related) **Historical article** · Originally published February 26, 2005; technical details may be outdated. One of the coolest things I got to find out today from the PM of the MSBuild product, Kieran Mockford, is that development on the next version of MSBuild has been done using Test Driven Development. Yep, Write a test that fails, make it work, refactor. In fact, since it started long before Team System, they used NUnit to develop the unit tests. Kieren informed me that he considers to be a great help to the product and he's very happy with this method of working. He's a great guy and very interesting to talk to. This just goes to show you that this "hype" is not just buzz words flying around. Its being done by real people on real projects, even at the largest scale, and it proves itself every day. As for MSBuild, One of the main concerns I had was whether we're going to get a good configuration tool to go with it. The current answer seems to be "no", but from non-official discussion it looks as if such a thing is being considered one way or the other. As Kieran will be doing a talk tomorrow about Team System, I'll try to get him to do [a small interview](http://teamagile.com/mainpages/interviews.html) with me about TDD and MSBuild. We'll see. ## More in Agile Related [All posts in Agile Related](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile-related) - Feb 27, 2005 ### [Response to the test generation "bug" I posted about](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/2/27/response-to-the-test-generation-quotbugquot-i-posted-about.html) - Feb 26, 2005 ### [How big organizations (surprisingly) always advocated test driven development](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/2/26/how-big-organizations-surprisingly-always-advocated-test-dri.html) - Feb 21, 2005 ### [TDD and test generation in VS 2005 can be annoying and tricky if you don't watch out](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/2/21/tdd-and-test-generation-in-vs-2005-can-be-annoying-and-trick.html) - Feb 21, 2005 ### [CxxTest for C++ - easier unit testing?](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/2/21/cxxtest-for-c-easier-unit-testing.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/