this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming

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What are your programming hot takes? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/programming
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

TDD as in religion is overrated. TDD done right is IMHO extremely effective.

The problem is, writing good tests is really hard, and I have seen/committed/experienced a lot of bad tests... just the top of my mind problems with TDD done wrong:

  • testing the implementation instead the interface
  • creating a change detector
  • not writing / factoring the tests in a good way
  • writing tests / TDD w/o having an overall design for the software

For every non trivial piece of software written w/o TDD, I always saw the same pattern: First few hours/days/weeks, rapid progress compared to TDD, afterwards: hours/days/weeks wasted in debugging, bug fixing etc... and the people can not even catch up with tests if they wanted.

Is TDD always the answer? Of course not, it is a tradeoff like everything else in technology. OTOH I have yet to see a project which benefited from not using TDD by any metric after a few days in.