TDD is BS?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, June 19, 2013 10:29:49 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 04:52:22PM +0200, bearophile wrote:
> > irritate:
> > >My feelings about TDD changed when I saw that talk explaining TDD
> > >in the context of double-entry bookkeeping in accounting
> > 
> > I think the usefulness of the TDD method is greatly different for
> > different kinds of code to write.
> > 
> > This is another data point for the discussion:
> > http://devgrind.com/2007/04/25/how-to-not-solve-a-sudoku/
> 
> [...]
> 
> As someone else has pointed out, we need to distinguish between
> unit-testing and TDD.
> 
> I love D's built-in unittests. They have singlehandedly improved the
> quality of my code by leaps and bounds, just because they're so
> convenient to use, and help catch careless mistakes early.
> 
> However, I am skeptical about TDD.

Exactly. With TDD, you write the tests and then write the code, and I 
personally don't like that approach at all. I write the code; then I write the 
tests; and then I work on both until the code works with a reasonable amount 
of testing (which in most cases, I think is 100% with lots of corner cases 
being tested, but there's plenty of code where you can't reasonably do that). 
And while that approach involves heavy unit testing, it's not "test-driven" at 
all.

But if you want to do TDD, D certainly allows it. The unit testing facilities 
in the language enable unit testing, but how you go about writing them is 
completely up to you.

- Jonathan M Davis