Test-Driven Development is Stupid • Hacker News Board

Re: Test-Driven Development is Stupid

#111

Post by brlewis » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 2:34 PM UTC

What the author describes, writing the tests for an entire program before writing any of the program, may actually be stupid. But it is not TDD. According to Wikipedia it's a feature at a time, not a program at a time. I usually see it done one class or function at a time.

If the author had bad results writing tests for an entire program before writing any of the program, I'm not terribly suprised. But since doing so isn't TDD, it doesn't add even a single data point to the TDD discussion.

Re: Test-Driven Development is Stupid

#112

Post by ruraljuror » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 2:34 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #15

franciscop wrote: post #11

I love the first quote for how (ironically) true it is: "Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like try[ing] to lose weight by weighing yourself more often." From someone who has lost over 15kg in the past in few months, one of the things that helped most was starting weighing myself as I didn't do that previously. It kept reminding me that I wasn't still there and gave me more mot…

And it's actually been confirmed in a recent study: "Frequent Self-Weighing and Visual Feedback for Weight Loss in Overweight Adults" "The major finding of this study is that the use of frequent weighing accompanied by visual feedback of weight, without a prescribed diet or exercise plan, was effective in producing a small but sustainable weight loss in overweight males." http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobe/2015/763…

This is also a central theme in the popular book Willpower, which draws on a high number of psychology studies.

Re: Test-Driven Development is Stupid

#113

Post by blub » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #22

Just wait until he has to write a system with several hundred web services that have been documented to perform in a very precise manner given particular data sets, and have hundreds of customers who have integrated to that API, and absolutely required that there be no variance in the output in the API, or there (extraordinarily expensive) system integration will fail, at great costs to their business systems. I'm no…

Unit tests are useless for ensuring that a web service API works, they are too low level. You're supposed to be testing only the "units", aka classes or groups of methods.

Re: Test-Driven Development is Stupid

#114

Post by DougWebb » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 2:38 PM UTC

snowwolf wrote: post #79

theseatoms wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You are writing code to test something that doesn't even exist yet. To piggyback on this... sure, the code doesn't exist yet, but the project specs do. And unit tests can help by making the required specification explicit.

Anecdotal, but I've always found that if you can't write the test first it's a good indication that you probably don't yet have a good enough understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. Regarding the rest of the article it is pure trolling with nothing really useful to add to the debate.

I've always found that if you can't write the test first it's a good indication that you probably don't yet have a good enough understanding of the problem you are trying to solve.

The author's point, in the painting comparison and when mentioning other fields, is that you never have a good enough understanding of the problem you are trying to solve when you're just starting to work on it. Developing the code is an iterative process that refines your understanding of the problem and the correct solution, and only once you've done that do you know enough to write appropriate tests.

There are exceptions to this, but they tend to be less common or trivial. If you're implementing a known algorithm, such as an implementation of a mathematical function, you know enough to write the test cases first. You can do it for very generic libraries too, like a library of sorting methods. But in practice most code is not so easy to spec completely before you start to implement it.

Re: Test-Driven Development is Stupid

#115

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 2:43 PM UTC

I'm writing an SMTP server, and when I started it I looked at the problem, and for the first time since I stopped being a student, I had a well specified problem where I could try TDD.

At the time I rationalized it and said - nah, I'm too lazy for doing that on a side project. But as soon as I tried to use it in the real world, I discovered that all those RFCs are just crude approximations of how people used the server (most of them are even incomplete). There's absolutely no compliant client or server out there, and TDD would catch none of the bugs I discovered at the time. And that's with email - a protocol that people are working on standardizing since before the Internet existed.

Sorry, but nowadays I'm extremely skeptical about TDD having any application at all. Not even for reinventing the wheel.

Re: Test-Driven Development is Stupid

#116

Post by blub » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 2:44 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #83

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #51

> You are writing code to test something that doesn't even exist yet. I am not rightly able to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a method. Yeah, the fact that you can't comprehend why people do this is very clear; if you could, you wouldn't have written this terrible rant. It feels like the author is criticizing this before coming anywhere close to understanding why people do it. I real…

Yes. I was going to come on here and say the same thing: this guy doesn't know what the heck he is talking about. Your point is an excellent one. If you see hundreds of really smart people doing X and seemingly very happy with it, there's probably something going on there that's more important than just a bunch of fools with a fad. It might not be appropriate in your situation, it might be oversold by those folks --…

Unfortunately when it comes to software development, you can count on many techniques, processes and tools being exactly that: fads packaged expertly by consultants and salesmen to be gobbled up by the masses of managers, architects and developers in exchange for big bucks from trainings, courses and certificates. And you can bet that they will oversell it, hype it and denounce everyone that's trying to be reasonable as old fashioned, conservative and inflexible.

Extreme Programming has through its "extremeness" brought automated unit testing front and center. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea to do XP or TDD. Unit tests are now a mainstream idea, and being pedantic and militant about when exactly they should be written and what are the steps needed to be blessed as using the approved way is not being helpful.

Re: Test-Driven Development is Stupid

#117

Post by pc86 » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 2:50 PM UTC

> Week 3-4: Write tests.

> Week 5-10: Write code.

I'm not necessarily a TDD advocate but I've literally never heard anyone say you should spend two solid weeks writing tests and then six solid weeks writing code against those tests.

I mean, that's just idiotic.

Re: Test-Driven Development is Stupid

#118

Post by zimpenfish » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 2:51 PM UTC

Gigablah wrote: post #87

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I was going to come on here and say the same thing: this guy doesn't know what the heck he is talking about. Your point is an excellent one. If you see hundreds of really smart people doing X and seemingly very happy with it, there's probably something going on there that's more important than just a bunch of fools with a fad. It might not be appropriate in your situation, it might be oversold by those folks --…

> It continues to amaze me how people go from being a novice to being an expert. One day they can't code at all. Next day they know everything there is to know about it -- and can go on at length about why process X is a terrible thing, without even trying or understanding it. The Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

> The Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

But that also applies to ...

>> If you see hundreds of really smart people doing X and seemingly very happy with it, there's probably something going on there

Re: Test-Driven Development is Stupid

#119

Post by CamatHN » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #46

tomp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the most important one: ensuring you don't unexpectedly break your own code in the future (when you come back in 6 months and forget why exactly it's arr[1:n-1] not arr[0:n-1] or arr[1:n]).

Sounds like a well placed comment would be of more value than a test there.

Comments are easy to miss though. We arnt perfect about going through our code and testing gives us objective measures.

Re: Test-Driven Development is Stupid

#120

Post by brudgers » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 2:58 PM UTC

Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments? -- John Constable.