The Start-Up Trap
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The Start-Up Trap
1–10 of 145 posts
Re: The Start-Up Trap
#2Great, more TDD evangelism.
I would love to see an empirical study proving the claims made about TDD in this article and numerous others.
It seems to me TDD is a huge waste of time when prototyping a minimum viable product. You want me to spend 2 hours writing tests for a feature that someone's going to tell me to rip out 15 minutes later? No thanks.
It's really easy to tell others to use TDD, and even admonish them for not using it. But unless you are the one in their shoes, you will not know the whole of their reality.
In a perfect world I'd write tests for everything. In the real world, I write tests for almost nothing. Most of the work I do is on stuff that might be gone tomorrow.
Re: The Start-Up Trap
#3TDD is but one method of writing code; one that I've never found particularly useful. There's plenty of other things you can do to perform your job well.
Re: The Start-Up Trap
#4"Of course one of the disciplines I'm talking about is TDD. Anybody who thinks they can go faster by not writing tests is smoking some pretty serious shit."
Why do so many TDD people think that people who don't use TDD don't write tests?
Re: The Start-Up Trap
#5Great, more TDD evangelism. I would love to see an empirical study proving the claims made about TDD in this article and numerous others. It seems to me TDD is a huge waste of time when prototyping a minimum viable product. You want me to spend 2 hours writing tests for a feature that someone's going to tell me to rip out 15 minutes later? No thanks. It's really easy to tell others to use TDD, and even admonish them…
I agree. Prototype are not very well defined and prone to rapid changes. Besides that, when you have an app that interact a lot with third parties APIs, it's almost impossible to make useful tests. One guy working with us has basically mocked the whole world wide web to allow him to do TDD, sometimes TDD is just plain stupid.
Re: The Start-Up Trap
#6Great, more TDD evangelism. I would love to see an empirical study proving the claims made about TDD in this article and numerous others. It seems to me TDD is a huge waste of time when prototyping a minimum viable product. You want me to spend 2 hours writing tests for a feature that someone's going to tell me to rip out 15 minutes later? No thanks. It's really easy to tell others to use TDD, and even admonish them…
Although TDD does give you more confidence to make changes to your code in future, I think you're overlooking a major benefit, which is allowing swifter code/test/debug cycles.
So rather than having to make a change, run up the app in my browser, and manually test that the latest bit of code is working, I can test individual functions just by running my unit tests.
Of course this doesn't obviate the need for browser based testing too - but it can reduce the amount of it you need.
TDD allows me to produce working code faster by helping me notice and fix my errors sooner. If you're an excellent coder, maybe you don't need this- but I certainly do!
Re: The Start-Up Trap
#7Although I've been a hardcore TDD advocate from time to time, I find myself writing fewer and fewer tests in the early stages these days.
In the very earliest days of a startup, you can easily hold the entirety of the problem space in your head. Refactoring is simple, tests or not. I can destroy and rewrite a feature from scratch in hours or days. A non-trivial number of the features I'm writing will not exist in any form a week or two later. This is not a problem with process or planning; this is the nature of a startup.
I think that TDD is immensely valuable as a team and product grows, but claiming that your startup will fail because you aren't applying engineering "best practices" from day 1 is counter to most successful startups I've worked with.
Re: The Start-Up Trap
#8>Of course one of the disciplines I'm talking about is TDD. Anybody who thinks they can go faster by not writing tests is smoking some pretty serious shit.
That's some serious strawman. In between 0 tests and TDD, there's a lot of room to maneuver.
Re: The Start-Up Trap
#9TDD is like those best-practices books that everyone pretends to read, but hardly anyone ever really reads them (I'm looking at you Code Complete). The Folks that do read these books know the dirty secret that no one else really reads them either, but they feel that endorsing the books somehow gives them credibility.
TDD has its place, as most all main-stream methodologies do. But, lets just admit that the people that use this methodology are in the minority. The rest of us are working on smallish projects that are struggling to be worthy of the time-budget that they've been granted, and we're more worried about shipping than caring about how not having TDD in place will slow us down in phase III. Assuming phase III ever happens. We're using all the best-practices we can, but TDD doesn't rise above the bar most of the time.
Re: The Start-Up Trap
#10Skipping testing amounts to risk. The winners in a brutal race take every risk to win.
So yes, its foolish to skip testing. And yes, the race goes to the foolish.