Tester-driven development

Tester-driven development, or bug-driven development is an anti-pattern where the requirements are determined by bug reports or test results rather than, for example, the value or cost of a feature. The concept is generally invoked facetiously, and comes with the implication that high volumes of computer code are written with little regard for unit testing by the programmers.

The term itself is a tongue-in-cheek reference to test-driven development, a widely used methodology in agile software practices. In test driven development tests are used to drive the implementation towards fulfilling the requirements. Tester-driven development instead shortcuts the process by removing the determination of requirements and letting the testers (or the QA team) drive what they think the software should be through the testing (or QA) process.

See also