This report aims at providing software developers with an understanding of the test driven software development practices and methods in the context of Java and J2EE "(WEB_19, 2005)" based technologies. The study is presented in two main stages. The first stage describes the evolution of software verification and validation techniques and how they have been applied throughout the software development lifecycle, progressing upto Agile Software Development practices and Test Driven Development. The second stage of the study presents a collection of patterns and methods for applying test driven development in real world scenarios. These techniques also aim to show how test driven development forces the classes and responsibilities to be decoupled and highly cohesive, leading to a beter object oriented design and high quality code.