Test-Driven Development (TDD) is at the heart of low-defect agile software development, enabling incremental development and emergent design without degrading quality. By allowing software teams to create comprehensive regression tests that immediately pinpoint tiny errors, it gives them confidence to enhance functionality with incredible speed.   Essential Test-Driven Development will help you discover how TDD helps developers take back the joy of software development, as you glimpse of the future of TDD and software development as a profession. Leading TDD coach and instructor Rob Myers shares his experiences, suggestions, and stories, plus focused and fun self-directed Java, C#, C++, and JavaScript lab work from his acclaimed TDD course.   Throughout, this guide reflects the author's unsurpassed experience practicing TDD on real production code and helping hundreds of teams adopt TDD practices. Myers addresses both human motivations and technical challenges, and stresses benefits to individual programmers, not just companies. He also offers exceptional coverage of massive refactoring and legacy code, reflecting the actual realities most developers face.