TDD is BS?

Paulo Pinto pjmlp at progtools.org
Wed Jun 19 05:08:26 PDT 2013


On Wednesday, 19 June 2013 at 11:01:05 UTC, Szymon Gatner wrote:
> This is not strictly D related but I am very curious about D's 
> community opinion on the points made by non other than Jim 
> Coplien here:
>
> http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/16130/
>
> D is the only language (that I am aware of) that has first 
> class unit testing support. What do you think? Do we really 
> just "mentally masturbate"?
>
> Article about the myths of TDD referenced in the talk:
>
> http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=csse_fac

I do believe in testing and while I seldom use D, the JVM and 
.NET projects I take part on, have usually a focus on unit 
testing.

However, testing is done in parallel with coding or on the final 
week of each sprint. I don't believe in TDD without design, 
coding without design is cowboy coding where the system 
architecture ends up full with broken design.

TDD, mocking and so on, is nice product to sell in conferences 
presented with dynamic languages where the presenter has full 
control of all libraries. This is surely not the case in the 
enterprise with strong typed languages, where most of the third 
party libraries are available in binary form only.

Additionally I am yet to find any form of unit testing that is 
possible to apply to UI code, in a way that the ROI really pays 
off.

Finally, 100% test coverage does not mean anything if the tests 
are not written in a way to really test the product. If you want 
to see a junk pile unit tests just ask for 100% coverage, you 
will get tests that exercise all code paths but without any real 
meaning.

--
Paulo


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