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I interpret Bob's post as saying that having automated tests is critical, not that TDD is the one and only way to test. I know he uses the acronym TDD but his l
by d4vlx 14y ago
I interpret Bob's post as saying that having automated tests is critical, not that TDD is the one and only way to test. I know he uses the acronym TDD but his logic all points toward the value of automated tests and he did not mention that TDD is the only way to do it.
When looked at in this light his advice is spot on for me. The kind of projects I work on would quickly get bogged down and have high failure chances without automated tests. When my current employer was in the startup phase they ignored testing, were making tones of money, hired tones of devs and wrote tons of code. At least they wrote tons of code for the first couple years then they hit a wall where it became incredibly difficult to add new functionality. Now that they have been writing automated tests for 5 years new functionality is comparatively easy to add to anything but that original project (which is still running making money but very hard to change). This is server side financial processing, user management, business logic code.
- mattmanser 14y agoTDD is mentioned specifically several times. He starts the entire sentence about tests with: Of course one of the disciplines I'm talking about is TDD. We're talking about Uncle Bob here. If Uncle Bob doesn't realize there's a difference between TDD and automated tests, then there's been a whole lot of arguing about nothing for the last few years. In other words, no, you can't interpret Uncle Bob that way, he really is talking about TDD.
- d4vlx 14y agoI no doubt he knows very well what TDD is. Even if he is being as dogmatic as plinkplonk claims I still think his advice has merit because this and the last post are great justifications for automated testing. Attacking dogmatic TDD seems beside the point to me.