[TIP] testing: why bother?

Michael Foord michael at voidspace.org.uk
Wed Mar 23 09:32:27 PDT 2011


On 23/03/2011 16:14, Kumar McMillan wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 10:16 AM, Michael Foord
> <michael at voidspace.org.uk>  wrote:
>> TDD isn't really that hard. It does require, impose, a change in thinking
>> (which is why Titus is so suspicious) but the actual process is simple
>> enough.
>>
>> The "Advantages" section of Jonathan Hartley's excellent presentation on TDD
>> provide some good pithy reasons to test (particularly but not solely reasons
>> to do TDD):
> I have tried TDD but it feels more natural for me to commence most
> *new* projects or *hard* problems with a prototyping phase where I
> hack code without any tests just to get it to work.  Afterwards, I
> usually throw away a lot of that code and rewrite/restructure using a
> TDD approach.  For small changes, bug fixes, or easy problems I always
> use TDD.  The prototyping phase is risky but it's faster, easier, and
> less wasteful (for example, you don't have irrelevant tests laying
> around).
>
That process is incorporated within classic TDD and is called "spiking" 
(experimental or exploratory changes where testing is inappropriate 
because you don't know *what* to test).

Michael

> Kumar
>
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