Approval Testing may seem odd compared to Test-Driven Development, but it’s designed to let you write automated tests when you already have a large codebase (that may already be in production) and/or the business requirements are out of date, incomplete, or completely missing. While this may sound crazy, it’s something most programmers have had to deal with.

The Good News is that Approval Testing evolved as a solution for just this kind of problem. It makes the reasonable assumption that the current behavior of production code is correct, and compares it with how the system behaves after you’ve made some changes. If the results are identical then the test passes; if not, then it shows you the differences so you can decide whether the changes are correct or not. With Approval Tests in place, you can safely refactor the existing production code, then start introducing Test-Driven Development when adding new features to the system.