Performance testing best practices when doing TDD?

Question

I\'m working on a project which is in serious need of some performance tuning.

How do I write a test that fails if my optimizations do not in improve the speed of the pr

Answer 1

I suspect that applying TDD to drive performance is a mistake. By all means, use it to get to good design and working code, and use the tests written in the course of TDD to ensure continued correctness - but once you have well-factored code and a solid suite of tests, you are in good shape to tune, and different (from TDD) techniques and tools apply.

TDD gives you good design, reliable code, and a test coverage safety net. That puts you into a good place for tuning, but I think that because of the problems you and others have cited, it's simply not going to take you much further down the tuning road. I say that as a great fan and proponent of TDD and a practitioner.