this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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TDD is great when you have a very narrow use case, for example an algorithm. Where you already know beforehand: If I throw A in B should come out. If I throw B in C should come out. If I throw Z in an error should be thrown. And so on.
For that it's awesome, which is mostly algorithms.
In real CRUD apps though? You have to write the actual implementation before the tests. Because in the tests you have to mock all the dependencies you used. Come up with fake test data. Mock functions from other classes you aren't currently testing and so on. You could try TDD for this, but then you probably spend ten times longer writing and re-writing tests :-/
After a while it boils down to: Small unit tests where they make sense. Then system wide integration tests for complex use-cases.
Totally agree.
I think we should all strive to do better. Unit tests, mock-ups, UX design, 2 week sprints with actual working deliverables, well documented use cases, every thing neatly stacked in Jira, dev,test,staging,prod environments, continuous integration and every thing else we are told to do.
Then reality sets in……
With all that said, 25 years as a dev, this utopian environment is almost impossible to find unless forced by regulatory compliance. Medical devices, life critical systems, etc. or if you have big piles of money.
In my experience, those things tend to be forced by project managers who believe the highest law of the land is proper scrum. Unsurprisingly, this makes all the devs miserable with no way to change anything because "this is just how it's done".