3 ms·

> TDD encourages you to write many times the number of lines of code for your tests as the code you're testing, often 10X or more. If that happens I'd say you'

by imiric 5y ago

> TDD encourages you to write many times the number of lines of code for your tests as the code you're testing, often 10X or more. If that happens I'd say you're doing TDD too early. TDD can be very useful, but early on in the process of transferring a design to code, all your interfaces are highly unstable and there's a lot of experimentation, so sticking strictly to TDD would naturally be frustrating. I would start a bit later when at least some of the API has stabilized and you don't have to do major changes. TDD helps with creating user friendly APIs, since you experience it from the user's perspective. And it forces you to actually write testable code and not incur technical debt that's very costly to remove later (having to refactor code to make it testable). > Most of the time, that's enough weight that the better design simply doesn't happen and becomes yet another chunk of tech debt that prevents certain things from happening in the future. This reads like you're saying that tests themselves are technical debt...? Because you're going to run into this issue (or should run into it) regardless if you use TDD or not. Eventually you'll want to refactor parts of your codebase and, sure, you'll have to change some of your, hopefully mostly, unit tests. So in that sense you can say that doing TDD early creates a lot of technical debt that needs to be resolved quickly, but like I said above, that doesn't have to be the case. TDD can be a dogma just like any practice (Agile is my favorite), but it doesn't mean that it's not useful if used correctly. Kudos to the Factorio team for adopting it, which I think is rare in the gaming industry. The idea alone of testing the complexities of a video game is mind boggling to me as a web developer. Especially in an industry where it's popular to hype and sell broken products with the promise of patches and DLC.

naikrovek 5y ago
does TDD not dictate that you write tests first, before you write the code under test? then you write only enough code to make the test pass, as I recall. yeah TDD is a mess
- imiric 5y ago
  Why does a practice have to "dictate" anything? TDD is a workflow suggestion, not gospel that must be strictly followed. Writing and maintaining a test before any experiments have been done with the design would indeed be frustrating and lead to a lot of rewriting. If you first explore the design and allow it to settle into a usable interface and then write the test for it as assurance that it's stable, you'd have the benefit of being able to safely refactor the feature and quickly add more tests for it. As long as the deliverable includes tests with decent coverage, who cares whether you wrote a test first without writing a single line of the implementation?
  - naikrovek 5y ago
    > TDD is a workflow suggestion, not gospel that must be strictly followed. you haven't been talking to the same people I've been talking to, I guess. TDD is sacred and must be strictly adhered to, according to them. "anything less is just plain testing and is useless." and people sometimes ask why I have such strong opinions against things like this. it's because people who don't write software come up with these things, and their lack of experience hides the realities of software development from them. they mean well, and they cause harm.

by imiric 5y ago

naikrovek 5y ago

does TDD not dictate that you write tests first, before you write the code under test? then you write only enough code to make the test pass, as I recall. yeah TDD is a mess

imiric 5y ago
Why does a practice have to "dictate" anything? TDD is a workflow suggestion, not gospel that must be strictly followed. Writing and maintaining a test before any experiments have been done with the design would indeed be frustrating and lead to a lot of rewriting. If you first explore the design and allow it to settle into a usable interface and then write the test for it as assurance that it's stable, you'd have the benefit of being able to safely refactor the feature and quickly add more tests for it. As long as the deliverable includes tests with decent coverage, who cares whether you wrote a test first without writing a single line of the implementation?
- naikrovek 5y ago
  > TDD is a workflow suggestion, not gospel that must be strictly followed. you haven't been talking to the same people I've been talking to, I guess. TDD is sacred and must be strictly adhered to, according to them. "anything less is just plain testing and is useless." and people sometimes ask why I have such strong opinions against things like this. it's because people who don't write software come up with these things, and their lack of experience hides the realities of software development from them. they mean well, and they cause harm.