Test-Driven Development? Give me a break…

Update: At the bottom of this post, I’ve linked to two large and quite different discussions of this post, both of which are worth reading…

Update 2: If the contents of this post make you angry, okay. It was written somewhat brashly. But, if the title alone makes you angry, and you decide this is an article about “Why Testing Code Sucks” without having read it, you’ve missed the point. Or I explained it badly 🙂

Some things programmers say can be massive red flags. When I hear someone start advocating Test-Driven Development as the One True Programming Methodology, that’s a red flag, and I start to assume you’re either a shitty (or inexperienced) programmer, or some kind of Agile Testing Consultant (which normally implies the former).Testing is a tool for helping you, not for using to engage in a “more pious than thou” dick-swinging my Cucumber is bigger than yours idiocy. Testing is about giving you the developer useful and quick feedback about if you’re on the right path, and if you’ve broken something, and for warning people who come after you if they’ve broken something. It’s not an arcane methodology that somehow has some magical “making your code better” side-effect…

The whole concept of Test-Driven Development is hocus, and embracing it as your philosophy, criminal. Instead: Developer-Driven Testing. Give yourself and your coworkers useful tools for solving problems and supporting yourselves, rather than disappearing in to some testing hell where you’re doing it a certain way because you’re supposed to.

Have I had experience (and much value) out of sometimes writing tests for certain problem classes before writing any code? Yes. Changes to existing functionality are often a good candidate. Small and well-defined pieces of work, or little add-ons to already tested code are another.

But the demand that you should always write your tests first? Give me a break.

This is idiocy during a design or hacking or greenfield phase of development. Allowing your tests to dictate your code (rather than influence the design of modular code) and to dictate your design because you wrote over-invasive test is a massive fail.

Writing tests before code works pretty well in some situations. Test Driven Development, as handed down to us mortals by Agile Testing Experts and other assorted shills, is hocus.

Labouring under the idea that Tests Must Come First (and everything I’ve seen, and everything I do see now suggests that that is the central idea in TDD – you write a test, then you write the code to pass it) without pivoting to see that testing is a useful practice in so much as it helps developers is the wrong approach.

Even if you write only some tests first, if you want to do it meaningfully, then you either need to zoom down in to tiny bits of functionality first in order to be able to write those tests, or you write a test that requires most of the software to be finished, or you cheat and fudge it. The former is the right approach in a small number of situations – tests around bugs, or small, very well-defined pieces of functionality).

Making tests a central part of the process because they’re useful to developers? Awesome. Dictating a workflow to developers that works in some cases as the One True Way: ridiculous.

Testing is about helping developers, and recognizing that automated testing is about benefit to developers, rather than cargo-culting a workflow and decreeing that one size fits all.

Writing tests first as a tool to be deployed where it works is “Developer Driven Testing” – focusing on making the developer more productive by choosing the right tool for the job. Generalizing a bunch of testing rules and saying This Is The One True Way Even When It Isn’t – that’s not right.

Discussion and thoughts (posted a few hours later)…

I wrote this a few short hours ago, and it’s already generated quite the discussion.

On Hacker News, there’s a discussion that I think asks a lot of good questions, and there’s a real set of well-reasoned opinions. I have been responding on there quite a bit with the username peteretep.

On Reddit, the debate is a little more … uh … robust. There are a lot of people defending writing automated tests. As this blog is largely meant to move forward as being a testing advocacy and practical advice resource, I’ve clearly miscommunicated my thoughts, and not made it clear enough that I think software testing is pretty darn awesome, but I’m put off by slavish adherence to a particular methodology!

If you’ve posted a comment on the blog and it’s not there yet, sorry. Some are getting caught in the spam folder. I’m not censoring anyone, and I’m not planning to, so please be patient!

Anyway, the whole thing serves me right for putting together my first blog post by copy-pasting from a bunch of HN comments I’d made. The next article is a walk-through of retro-fitting functional testing to large web-apps that don’t already have it, and in such a way as the whole dev team starts using it.