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I'm afraid that the TDD movement went to far. The proponents became so convinced that they were right that they started comparing themselves to people who argu

by geebee 9y ago

I'm afraid that the TDD movement went to far. The proponents became so convinced that they were right that they started comparing themselves to people who argued that washing hands was important in early surgery, and that those who questioned it would soon be unemployable in the field. Not those who didn't practice it, those who questioned it. I dealt with some of this, including a rather bullying type who tried to browbeat people into writing tests first. And while that may be a bad example, I'm afraid it really wasn't unrelated to the movement itself. When people, a while ago, said "TDD is dead", they didn't actually argue that the technique wasn't useful. They were saying that the whole "you're wrong, I'm right, if you want to stay employed you'll do as I say and practice TDD", that is no longer defensible. It's probably time to leave that in the past, and hope that people who promote a methodology this way have learned the mistakes of aggressively cramming things down everyone's throat. Truth is, I was actually a frequent practitioner of TDD, and I was pretty appalled with how it was getting pitched to the programming community. Now, let's leave that in the past and take a fresh look on whether TDD is a very beneficial practice in many contexts. I certainly agree it isn't crap.

adrianmonk 9y ago
As in many areas of thought, when the pendulum swings too far in one direction, it then swings too far in the other direction. Hopefully we'll arrive at a reasonable middle ground at some point, and unit tests will be valued (and prioritized) neither too much nor too little. On a side note, unfortunately I think the software industry tends to be particularly bad about this pendulum swinging back and forth between extremes thing. There is so much emphasis on innovation that people are biased toward making radical changes and believing they are going to revolutionize everything. And the culture is such that the more you go out on a limb and push something radical, the more you are respected, because we often value guts more than good judgement.
- eric_h 9y ago
  > the pendulum swings too far in one direction, it then swings too far in the other direction > Hopefully we'll arrive at a reasonable middle ground at some point, and unit tests will be valued (and prioritized) neither too much nor too little. My coding style has very much gone through a similar evolution. When I first learned about TDD, I went in whole hog - test everything, ui tests, request tests, unit tests - tests for everything. Then I started to notice that the development costs associated with extreme coverage did not, in fact, pay off. The number of bugs found was vastly outnumbered by the time wasted dealing with the peculiarities of various ui testing frameworks, let alone the amount of time wasted waiting for those tests to run. My metric is now that I've written enough tests to feel confident that the code works. It's an extraordinarily qualitative metric, and I cannot find a way to objectively quantify it, yet it very much works for me. Really, it all comes down to visibility. Is there somewhere that is up to date, that will tell you what the code is supposed to do? Do you have tooling in production that will alert you when it's not doing what it's supposed to do? Do you feel confident that the code works?

by geebee 9y ago

adrianmonk 9y ago

As in many areas of thought, when the pendulum swings too far in one direction, it then swings too far in the other direction. Hopefully we'll arrive at a reasonable middle ground at some point, and unit tests will be valued (and prioritized) neither too much nor too little. On a side note, unfortunately I think the software industry tends to be particularly bad about this pendulum swinging back and forth between extremes thing. There is so much emphasis on innovation that people are biased toward making radical changes and believing they are going to revolutionize everything. And the culture is such that the more you go out on a limb and push something radical, the more you are respected, because we often value guts more than good judgement.

eric_h 9y ago
> the pendulum swings too far in one direction, it then swings too far in the other direction > Hopefully we'll arrive at a reasonable middle ground at some point, and unit tests will be valued (and prioritized) neither too much nor too little. My coding style has very much gone through a similar evolution. When I first learned about TDD, I went in whole hog - test everything, ui tests, request tests, unit tests - tests for everything. Then I started to notice that the development costs associated with extreme coverage did not, in fact, pay off. The number of bugs found was vastly outnumbered by the time wasted dealing with the peculiarities of various ui testing frameworks, let alone the amount of time wasted waiting for those tests to run. My metric is now that I've written enough tests to feel confident that the code works. It's an extraordinarily qualitative metric, and I cannot find a way to objectively quantify it, yet it very much works for me. Really, it all comes down to visibility. Is there somewhere that is up to date, that will tell you what the code is supposed to do? Do you have tooling in production that will alert you when it's not doing what it's supposed to do? Do you feel confident that the code works?