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> TDD is this crazy religion of writing tests for everything, Not true in my experience. You should only test code you wrote that can break. You do not test co

> TDD is this crazy religion of writing tests for everything, Not true in my experience. You should only test code you wrote that can break. You do not test core functionality, the OS underneath etc. You do not test the test themselves.

nickpsecurity 9y ago
"You should only test code you wrote that can break. " A common source of errors are mismatches between what your dependencies say they'll do and what they'll actually do. There's been huge, costly failures from developers expecting the dependency would honor its documentation or just take a standard approach to error handling. So, either testing them or at least good catch-all error handling + logging should be done.
bitwize 9y ago
No, TDD means that if there is a line of code anywhere that was not written to make some failing test pass, that code is by definition broken. ALL code must be against some test, else it's not TDD. And if you want to write code for which there is no test, you must write the test first, run the test suite to see it fail, and then implement the code that will make the test pass. Anything else is not TDD.
- mpeg 9y ago
  Should you write tests for the tests too? What I find is that in any project of a certain complexity, the tests can end up having the wrong scope or outright bugs in them.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I keep asking the same thing, especially that given any non-trivial self-contained piece of code, the test code will necessarily be isomorphic to the actual implementation - at which point one has to ask, why bother with TDD in the first place and not just write the complex code once?
- BeetleB 9y ago
  >No, TDD means that if there is a line of code anywhere that was not written to make some failing test pass, that code is by definition broken. ALL code must be against some test, else it's not TDD. Robert Martin is likely the biggest evangelist for TDD, and he does not advocate what you say. Why do people keep claiming you have to test every line of code in TDD?
- geezerjay 9y ago
  > No, TDD means that if there is a line of code anywhere that was not written to make some failing test pass, that code is by definition broken. No, it doesn't. TDD means tests are written to test the code, and the code being written must pass all tests. It's ok if at any point some parts of the code aren't covered by tests, because TDD is a cyclic process where at each cycle new tests are written to accompany changes in the code. It seems that the only people complaining about TDD are those who pull the strawman card and portray the process as being unreasonably convoluted and picky, to a level which is almost autistic.

nickpsecurity 9y ago

"You should only test code you wrote that can break. " A common source of errors are mismatches between what your dependencies say they'll do and what they'll actually do. There's been huge, costly failures from developers expecting the dependency would honor its documentation or just take a standard approach to error handling. So, either testing them or at least good catch-all error handling + logging should be done.

bitwize 9y ago

No, TDD means that if there is a line of code anywhere that was not written to make some failing test pass, that code is by definition broken. ALL code must be against some test, else it's not TDD. And if you want to write code for which there is no test, you must write the test first, run the test suite to see it fail, and then implement the code that will make the test pass. Anything else is not TDD.

mpeg 9y ago
Should you write tests for the tests too? What I find is that in any project of a certain complexity, the tests can end up having the wrong scope or outright bugs in them.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I keep asking the same thing, especially that given any non-trivial self-contained piece of code, the test code will necessarily be isomorphic to the actual implementation - at which point one has to ask, why bother with TDD in the first place and not just write the complex code once?
BeetleB 9y ago
>No, TDD means that if there is a line of code anywhere that was not written to make some failing test pass, that code is by definition broken. ALL code must be against some test, else it's not TDD. Robert Martin is likely the biggest evangelist for TDD, and he does not advocate what you say. Why do people keep claiming you have to test every line of code in TDD?
geezerjay 9y ago
> No, TDD means that if there is a line of code anywhere that was not written to make some failing test pass, that code is by definition broken. No, it doesn't. TDD means tests are written to test the code, and the code being written must pass all tests. It's ok if at any point some parts of the code aren't covered by tests, because TDD is a cyclic process where at each cycle new tests are written to accompany changes in the code. It seems that the only people complaining about TDD are those who pull the strawman card and portray the process as being unreasonably convoluted and picky, to a level which is almost autistic.