5 ms·

You know what's awesome about TDD? It means I, a nobody, can contribute to a huge open source project with lots of moving pieces and be pretty confident that I

You know what's awesome about TDD? It means I, a nobody, can contribute to a huge open source project with lots of moving pieces and be pretty confident that I'm not catastrophically breaking anything and that my feature works as intended. That's awesome!

humanrebar 9y ago
Right. Good tests are a passive communication tool. They communicate expectations. Most of the discussion here revolves around different people having different expectations. I think the "please test" people have a better argument mostly because they're advocating for tools for good communication.
- macawfish 9y ago
  Totally. I used to hate testing. It felt like someone making me do homework I didn't want to do. Then it dawned on me that I was already testing, the hard way, by opening up a console and manually setting up test conditions over and over and over again, and that I could do this much faster and in a reusable way by writing tests and running them. What an epiphany that was! I still open up the console all the time. It's a really useful thing. I think ideally, my testing environment would dump me into a full-fledged console if something went wrong, but this is not something I've taken the time to set up.
the_af 9y ago
That seems to do more with automated testing (unit, regression, integration, etc) than with TDD. It's important not to conflate the two because TDD proponents say that TDD is not primarily about testing.
- macawfish 9y ago
  Thanks for clarifying this. I wasn't aware of the hardcore TDD thing, I moreso just interpreted TDD to be the concept of "write tests as you code".
  - hwayne 9y ago
    Yeah. "Pure" TDD is strict cycles of "Write failing test, write the bare minimum of code that passes, refactor", which most studies suggest isn't much more helpful than the "common practice" TDD of "write tests as you code".
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      It's not more helpful as tests than "write tests as you code". But "pure" TDD is more helpful as a guide to low-level design. I'm not sure that most studies can quantify that.
      - hwayne 9y ago
        My first resource on these things is the absolutely fantastic book "Making Software", which has overviews of a lot of these questions how they're studied. The studies they looked at didn't find a correlation between pure TDD and 'software quality', but they admit the data is pretty scarce.
whipoodle 9y ago
TDD means something different than "having tests".
59nadir 9y ago
All projects that have been created using TDD have tests, but not all projects that have tests have been created using TDD. You're saying that having tests is good and I would assume most people agree... But that doesn't mean that TDD is automatically great. It's the DD part a lot of people find themselves skeptical towards.

humanrebar 9y ago

Right. Good tests are a passive communication tool. They communicate expectations. Most of the discussion here revolves around different people having different expectations. I think the "please test" people have a better argument mostly because they're advocating for tools for good communication.

macawfish 9y ago
Totally. I used to hate testing. It felt like someone making me do homework I didn't want to do. Then it dawned on me that I was already testing, the hard way, by opening up a console and manually setting up test conditions over and over and over again, and that I could do this much faster and in a reusable way by writing tests and running them. What an epiphany that was! I still open up the console all the time. It's a really useful thing. I think ideally, my testing environment would dump me into a full-fledged console if something went wrong, but this is not something I've taken the time to set up.

the_af 9y ago

That seems to do more with automated testing (unit, regression, integration, etc) than with TDD. It's important not to conflate the two because TDD proponents say that TDD is not primarily about testing.

macawfish 9y ago
Thanks for clarifying this. I wasn't aware of the hardcore TDD thing, I moreso just interpreted TDD to be the concept of "write tests as you code".
- hwayne 9y ago
  Yeah. "Pure" TDD is strict cycles of "Write failing test, write the bare minimum of code that passes, refactor", which most studies suggest isn't much more helpful than the "common practice" TDD of "write tests as you code".
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    It's not more helpful as tests than "write tests as you code". But "pure" TDD is more helpful as a guide to low-level design. I'm not sure that most studies can quantify that.
    - hwayne 9y ago
      My first resource on these things is the absolutely fantastic book "Making Software", which has overviews of a lot of these questions how they're studied. The studies they looked at didn't find a correlation between pure TDD and 'software quality', but they admit the data is pretty scarce.

whipoodle 9y ago

TDD means something different than "having tests".

59nadir 9y ago

All projects that have been created using TDD have tests, but not all projects that have tests have been created using TDD. You're saying that having tests is good and I would assume most people agree... But that doesn't mean that TDD is automatically great. It's the DD part a lot of people find themselves skeptical towards.