[OT] TDD is dead. Long live testing. (DHH)

More or less what I think: testing is necessary and should be pragmatic & fun, not a dogma

http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.html 

Testing has become more necessary in the context of Continuous
Integration and automated building. You can't have those without test
coverage.

On the other hand, TDD is rather difficult with tools that doesn't
allow you to develop inside the debugger, which is basically
everything out there that is not Smalltalk. It's no surprise TDD was
born in Smalltalk.

I don't agree with the notion of testing the full system, including
DBs, I/O, etc.  I'd also mock as few as possible.
Constraining yourself to test without external dependencies and
without mocking (as far as possible) helps you build loosely coupled
systems, with a lot of interchangeable parts
(pluggables/strategies/etc.).

Though as David says, testing is not a religion nor a dogma, and
sometime you include a separate set of tests to test the WHOLE layers
of your system. But those tests are run separately.


Regards!







Esteban A. Maringolo


2014-04-23 12:35 GMT-03:00 Sven Van Caekenberghe <[hidden email]>:
> More or less what I think: testing is necessary and should be pragmatic & fun, not a dogma
>
> http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.html
>
>

TDD is great if you don't know the domain you're modeling, or if it
isn't completely specified.
Because you end up having the required functionality completely tested.

On the other hand, if you are an expert in the domain, you'll
implement features that are beyond the required (initial) specs, so
you'll code ahead of the specs, and doing everything TDD will be a
burden.

Regards!
Esteban A. Maringolo


2014-04-23 15:11 GMT-03:00 kilon alios <[hidden email]>: