Pre-emptive Commit Messages

Write commit messages before coding. Describe how the software behaves, not what you have done. Behaviours, Not Tests Daniel Terhorst-North changed my life. I always recommend his Introducing BDD. It explains how Behaviour-Driven Development started from the intuition that TDD is not merely about testing. The word “test” itself points developers in the wrong direction, he says, toward verification, toward the past. He prefers using “behaviour”. It’s a dramatic change of perspective. For Daniel tests document the system’s behaviour from the outside, from the point of view of its clients or users; therefore, they describe what the system should do, using narrative sentences. They are in fact business requirements, written in the business language and, of course, conceived before the implementation even exists. Why Test-First? Some find it counterintuitive, if not crazy, writing tests before the system under test even exists. Yet, if you replace the word “test” with “requirement”, all…