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An important requirement of TDD is that you decouple the functionality from the implementation, for exactly this reason. You should be able to completely rewrit

An important requirement of TDD is that you decouple the functionality from the implementation, for exactly this reason. You should be able to completely rewrite your implementation from scratch, and only minimally update your tests. And the ability to do that is exactly the benefit that TDD can bring. I find red-green-refactor MOST helpful during exploratory coding. There's a principle that Uncle Bob calls "Don't go for the gold": "stay away from the center of the algorithm for as long as possible. Deal with the degenerate, trivial, and simple administrative tasks first." I build up to the final, complex final functionality one small step at a time. At no point do I need to architect the whole kit and caboodle at once, then re-architect, then re-architect. It's all just aggregate improvements and refactoring what's already there.

jpz 6y ago
Your quotes from Uncle Bob to my ears sound like trite nonsense. Moreover, name-checking him and then giving quotations of what he said seems positively religious. My basic argument with agile is this - can it be measured that these things are good? Or is it just a pile of piffle built on anecdotal evidence - that people get paid thousands of dollars a day as consultants to espouse? The industry has a long legacy of this - e.g. designing your classes in UML will solve your problems, or the Rational Unified Process, or prior to that, in the early 90s, Rational Rose diagramming experience was the "must have" on your CV. One of the more reasonable analysis tools was Use Cases in my view, but most of it is just a bunch of noise, busy-making tasks which Andersen Consulting were more than happy to provide 100 people doing these tasks and bilk some client 100m for the pleasure. There's no substitute for high quality, intelligent people self-organising. People that want to proceduralise developer behaviour are basically people that want to steal our freedom to be creative and effective, in the manner which befits ourselves as individuals. And make themselves ghastly rich doing it. I don't see Uncle Bob as all that different, having hung out in the Agile evangelist scene in London for a while - they are all on the lam. In my opinion.

jpz 6y ago

Your quotes from Uncle Bob to my ears sound like trite nonsense. Moreover, name-checking him and then giving quotations of what he said seems positively religious. My basic argument with agile is this - can it be measured that these things are good? Or is it just a pile of piffle built on anecdotal evidence - that people get paid thousands of dollars a day as consultants to espouse? The industry has a long legacy of this - e.g. designing your classes in UML will solve your problems, or the Rational Unified Process, or prior to that, in the early 90s, Rational Rose diagramming experience was the "must have" on your CV. One of the more reasonable analysis tools was Use Cases in my view, but most of it is just a bunch of noise, busy-making tasks which Andersen Consulting were more than happy to provide 100 people doing these tasks and bilk some client 100m for the pleasure. There's no substitute for high quality, intelligent people self-organising. People that want to proceduralise developer behaviour are basically people that want to steal our freedom to be creative and effective, in the manner which befits ourselves as individuals. And make themselves ghastly rich doing it. I don't see Uncle Bob as all that different, having hung out in the Agile evangelist scene in London for a while - they are all on the lam. In my opinion.