On: Uncle Bob on DHH: Monogamous TDD

[daleharvey]

This post makes me somewhat sad, I think testing is one of the least understood and most important part of being a professional software developer, but through university and still to today its easy to find people dismissing it as unnecessary effort and I think a part of that is down to 'advocates' who turn everything into an argument of semantics.

I posted after dhh's post "I think we should just stop calling them "unit" "integration" or "system" and just call them "tests", there isnt a useful distinction"

This post has almost 0 content and vaguelly handwaves about testing being good in between 90% of seemingly willfully misunderstanding what dhh said.

[collyw → daleharvey]

Testing is just another tool, and should be used when appropriate. I don't have a lot of automated tests for my application, but it is an in house app, so I get immediate feedback from users if something isn't working. I do have a set of tests for certain parts where it seemed to be appropriate and saved me a lot of time when refactoring.

I was keen to put in a lot of automated tests a couple of years back, but it was proving extremely time consuming to generate fixtures that made the tests meaningful (and management decided there were more urgent tasks). Looking back on it, it would have caught a few bugs, BUT not that many considering the effort generating all the fixtures and tests would have taken.

[daleharvey → collyw]

I agree that its a tool to be used when appropriately, I wasnt going to follow up talking about how advocates are often too adherent to dogma with 'everything ever should be tested'

But I still think comparative to how essential it is to a huge amount of projects, the lack of understanding and maturity of the tools is lacking, on all projects I work on, tests and test infrastructure is the major bottleneck.