this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
654 points (97.8% liked)

Programmer Humor

32600 readers
80 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's also great for bug fixes. Write that sucker first and you have an easy way to reproduce the issue and check whether it's fixed.

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'm constantly recommending junior devs to use TDD specifically for this. I don't recommend it for anything else. If they don't write the test first, it's possible that the test will end up testing the wrong thing and thus they can't be sure they really did fix the bug.

Sometimes it's hard to tell where to write the test ahead of time, so sometimes a slight variation I do is to write the test after (usually because it was such a struggle to figure out where the bug is), but when I'm testing it, I'll comment out the fix or whatever and make sure the test fails.