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eXtreme Programming

In the eXtreme Programming paradigm the following two key aspects are somewhat in contradiction:

  1. Write your test before you write your code.
  2. Make sure your test suite always passes at 100%.

Of course after you already wrote your tests for a new feature but before you can write the actual code there is a short time period when your test suite will not pass 100%.

Worse than that, it is also recommended that immediately when you get a bug report from somewhere you should write a test case that reproduces this bug. Obviously this test will fail before you fix the bug and will hopefully pass once you fixed it.

In order to make the test suite happy there is a way to tell the harness tool that a test is supposed to fail. That is, we know it will fail. What we can do to achieve this is to set one or more tests to be in a TODO block.