I’m going to go ahead and give myself a test-driven development badge.

ConAgra Foods is in the process of piloting an Agile methodology (ACE, or Agile for ConAgra Enterprise) catered to us by IBM. Part of that methodology is the use of Test Driven Development, a practice we’ve talked a lot about, but never implemented, due to challenges with our traditional approach.

The most critical among those challenges: we never wrote software based on discrete requirements.

We would jump right into coding after a quick conversation with our functional teams, and we never gave thought about individual units of functionality until we reached our testing phase. Simply, we never had an opportunity to write tests before we were already knee-deep in code.

So today I finished my first three tests, and tomorrow I’ll knock out a few more. Thereafter, I’ll re-read some TDD blog posts I had saved, and see just how TDD my approach was (I’ve probably done a few things wrong this first go around).