Engineer Applies Test-First Thinking to Requirements, Contracts, and Specs

Software engineer Anton, who works primarily with PHP/Symfony and Go, has written about extending test-driven development (TDD) principles beyond code to earlier stages of software work, including requirements and contracts. His core argument is that a checkable condition must be written before the thing it is meant to validate, otherwise it simply describes what was already built and cannot serve as a real gate. He illustrates this with a code coverage ratchet that prevents the recorded threshold from being lowered in pull requests, while honestly noting the bar is currently set at zero despite actual coverage sitting at 86.7%. A second example shows the approach working as intended, where a closing condition for a database-access refactor was written while the work was still in progress rather than after completion. Anton frames the method not as a testing philosophy but as a discipline around the order in which things are written down at all.