CCA-F: Claude Certified Architect — Foundations

Writing tests before implementation establishes concrete, objective success criteria for the algorithm's expected behavior, required edge cases (disconnected nodes, cycles, weighted edges), and performance requirements. This lets Claude receive precise, unambiguous feedback in the form of pass/fail test results rather than subjective natural-language descriptions, enabling it to autonomously iterate — running tests, analyzing failures, and adjusting the implementation — until all requirements are satisfied. This test-driven development workflow (write tests → confirm they fail → implement → iterate on failures) is Anthropic's documented best practice for agentic coding with Claude Code, since each red-to-green cycle provides a clear, verifiable signal that guides efficient convergence and also protects against Claude silently altering behavior instead of fixing the implementation, since the pre-committed tests serve as a stable checkpoint.