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"Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

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Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#81

Post by DougBTX »

axod wrote: post #49
swombat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Fraid not, axod. It's when you're quickly iterating and changing lots of stuff that quality unit testing helps you the most. Let's look at 2 possible scenarios: 1) You don't bother testing much. You make lots of changes, iterate quickly. Before the changes, you have code that, let's say, you know works. After the changes, you know there's probably bugs, but you don't know where. 2) You test fairly thoroughly. You ma…

>> "Before the changes you have code that you know works. After the changes, you know where most of the bugs are because your tests tell you where they are." No. More often than not, if you change was a large architectural one, which is often the case in young software, your tests are now irrelevant, or broken. >> "It's the difference between walking with your eyes open or closed... it may be more work to process all…

testThingsYouMightHaveChanged requires running your tests manually, which is slow and hard to fully reproduce later. It also depends on being able to make strong predictions about what your change affects, unit testing assumes that anything could have broken.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#82

Post by pkaler »

What has Kent Beck shipped?

Follow the advice of people that have shipped code. That is what I took from the Stack Overflow podcast.

Seriously, what has Kent Beck shipped? The Chrysler Compensation program is always brought up. But, I understand that the project was cancelled.

I'm not trying to troll here. I would have greater confidence in Kent Beck's argument if I knew what he was actually capable of shipping.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#83

Post by dasil003 »

nostrademons wrote: post #78
biohacker42 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, but it's not just fanboys, I've seen Uncle Bob speak and he's a lot less reasonable then he was in his response to Joel. The thing is, it's appropriate for his audience, large cubicle farms with a completely broken system. So oversimplifying and extreme work for Uncle Bob when he's consulting. Joel was obviously talking about the kind of super star programmers he hires in his magical fairy land office. (J…

Most great programmers take very well to unit tests. The way they became great was to assume their code is flawed and take steps to remedy that. Perhaps I'm being a little harsh, but I don't think Joel or his employees are really all that great. I mean, they're working on bugtracking software. Great programmers tend not to trade interesting problems for private offices and gigantic monitors (plus, they often can get…

I don't think anyone ever accused geeks of really meaning sexy when they say sexy. More like, to each his own.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#84

Post by biohacker42 »

nostrademons wrote: post #78
biohacker42 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, but it's not just fanboys, I've seen Uncle Bob speak and he's a lot less reasonable then he was in his response to Joel. The thing is, it's appropriate for his audience, large cubicle farms with a completely broken system. So oversimplifying and extreme work for Uncle Bob when he's consulting. Joel was obviously talking about the kind of super star programmers he hires in his magical fairy land office. (J…

Most great programmers take very well to unit tests. The way they became great was to assume their code is flawed and take steps to remedy that. Perhaps I'm being a little harsh, but I don't think Joel or his employees are really all that great. I mean, they're working on bugtracking software. Great programmers tend not to trade interesting problems for private offices and gigantic monitors (plus, they often can get…

I absolutely agree everybody, including the great ones, should write unit tests.

I think the storm in a programmer's tea cup here is exactly how much unit testing do you need.

Joel is accusing Kent Back and Robert Martin of wanting to write a whole testing framework for each and every little get and set method.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#85

Post by dasil003 »

michaelneale wrote: post #34
patio11 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what happens when you stick inventor of popular methodology A against inventor of popular methodology B? Is the disagreement blind zeal or professional opinions originally informed by first-hand experience? Or is the whole thing just like duct-taping buttered toast to the back of a cat and then pushing it off a high surface? (Toast always ends buttered side down. Cats always land feet first. Thus, if either lands…

Joel pushed no "methodology" in that sense at all. What I see is Kent Beck, who pushes a methodology which has taken up a religious like following in "IT" or corporate developer circles. Joel just ships software, and judges things in terms of commercial success in the market place.

You forgot to mention writes persuasively based on a handful of good ideas filled out with trite brain candy.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#86

Post by projectileboy »

pkaler wrote: post #82

What has Kent Beck shipped? Follow the advice of people that have shipped code. That is what I took from the Stack Overflow podcast. Seriously, what has Kent Beck shipped? The Chrysler Compensation program is always brought up. But, I understand that the project was cancelled. I'm not trying to troll here. I would have greater confidence in Kent Beck's argument if I knew what he was actually capable of shipping.

JUnit, for one thing.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#87

Post by michaelneale »

dasil003 wrote: post #85
michaelneale wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joel pushed no "methodology" in that sense at all. What I see is Kent Beck, who pushes a methodology which has taken up a religious like following in "IT" or corporate developer circles. Joel just ships software, and judges things in terms of commercial success in the market place.

You forgot to mention writes persuasively based on a handful of good ideas filled out with trite brain candy.

I am not really a fan of Joel's advice, but if I look at the relative successes, I would have to favour Joel (also, listening to him speak now, on that podcast, indicates that in his "old age" he really has less advice, he has mellowed out and realised that there is a lot more variables at play).

I think any methodology really boils down to: have good people any they will make something work. That is the only common thread in successful projects/teams/products that I have seen (and others). Its 80% people, perhaps more. Therefore any other tweaking of things are really like premature optimisation.

And I like brain candy. Its sweet in a bitter world ;)

I think Paul Bucheit said : "Limited life experience + overgeneralisation == advice".

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#88

Post by trapper »

swombat wrote: post #54
trapper wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two schools of thought in programming I have seen. 1. Design it right the first time, tests and all. 2. Build a throwaway, no tests, little refactoring as you quickly iterate Programmers who fall into category 1 in my experience mistakenly believe that they understand the requirements of the software they are writing. Category 2 programmers tend to be ones who actually deal with users/real world, and know t…

You're assuming that you'll get something in front of users more quickly without writing tests. I find that's not the case in my experience.

I'd love to see some research on this. I would hypothesize that there is a point of problem complexity where the lack of tests becomes a negative for productivity.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#90

Post by sayrer »

paul wrote: post #14
lacker wrote: post #4

Here's a transcript of the podcast I believe Kent is referring to. Judge for yourself whether Joel "makes comments that make clear his lack of knowledge". http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/01/31.html I'd like to see Kent respond to Joel's specific points. E.g: The real problem with unit tests as I've discovered is that the type of changes that you tend to make as code evolves tend to break a constant percentag…

I think I agree with everything Joel said in that post. These crazy rules people come up with for "proper object oriented" programming remind me of extreme religious rituals. You have to observe all these stupid little rules or else your code will become impure you and will spend an eternity in code maintenance hell. I'll make a somewhat heretical claim even: Unit test are 20% useful engineering, and 80% fad. They ar…

I think it depends on whether your users can write programs for your program.

I work on a web browser, and every test is worth something. To some degree, we don't care what the test is testing. We want to be sure we don't change it unintentionally, thus breaking the web.

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