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What Lao Tse thinks of TDD

Started by nstults · 9 months ago

Summer is tumbling into fall and apparently it has stirred the technology muses because the last few days seem to have invoked a collective urge to wax philosophical about development practices in the small corner of the blogosphere that I follow. Jimmy Bogard started the ball rolling comparing&%2 ... Continue reading »

2 comments

  • Kevin Pang

    9 months ago

    That was very well written. It's rare these days to see bloggers take the time and due diligence to write up something like this. Thank you for the interesting read.

    I find that your experience with TDD to be very similar to mine -- a little slow at first, but without a doubt worthwhile. I'm not so sure I agree with the analogy of TDD being the fingers of a potter; I think the comparison works better to software development as a whole. I'm not actually sure where TDD fits into that analogy to be honest. Perhaps that's why it's so hard for some to adopt it. There are very few professions where something like TDD is encouraged, so it only makes sense that it feels a bit unnatural to developers (and even moreso to newer developers who have not had to experience the pain that comes from working with code that is not unit tested).

    Anyways, those are my thoughts. Thanks again for the great read. :-)
    reply
  • nstults

    9 months ago

    I appreciate the compliment. I agree, my analogy was just one aspect of TDD, whereas it is a much larger practice than that. It's a strange practice - it is has immense value, and I agree that part of its difficulty is the lack of any counterpart in usual experience. It goes against the natural grain of logic - how can you test something you have only vaguely conceived? But you should. One of the things I love about software development, though, is its uniqueness - software as a medium is so pliable, so flexible, that it defies the usual approaches to engineering, which is why I think people have started calling it a "craft" - but it's also engineering - hard to pin down :) Thanks for the comment, and I'm glad you appreciated the post.
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