Towards Software Configuration Management for Test-Driven Development

Test-Driven Development is a technique where each change to the observable behavior of a program is motivated by a failing test. High design quality is maintained by continuous small design improvements called refactorings. While some integrated development environments support automated refactoring, they do not handle problems that occur if refactorings are used in development teams or on published interfaces. This paper outlines the idea of a specialized software configuration management tool which integrates into a development environment to record the steps of Test-Driven Development as operations. These operations are useful for summarizing local changes, merging parallel changes and for migrating code that uses published interfaces.