With the kind of software I mostly write these days, I'm fortunate to be able to incrementally develop my code and test it under real-world conditions or a subset thereof.
So my approach is exploratory coding -- I start with minimum workable implementations, make sure they work as needed, and then add more functionality, with further testing at each step.
The upside is that I don't have to write "strange" code to accommodate testing. The downside is that I'm forced to plan code growth with steps that take me from one testable partial-product to the next. A more serious downside, one I'm very aware of, is that not every project is amenable to this approach.
With the kind of software I mostly write these days, I'm fortunate to be able to incrementally develop my code and test it under real-world conditions or a subset thereof.
So my approach is exploratory coding -- I start with minimum workable implementations, make sure they work as needed, and then add more functionality, with further testing at each step.
The upside is that I don't have to write "strange" code to accommodate testing. The downside is that I'm forced to plan code growth with steps that take me from one testable partial-product to the next. A more serious downside, one I'm very aware of, is that not every project is amenable to this approach.