Programming

17503 readers

7 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

337

What are your programming hot takes? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

895 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] wolf 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.