I like TDD in theory and I spent so many years trying to get it perfect. I remember going to a conference where someone was teaching TDD while writing tic tac toe. Unsurprisingly, he didn't finish in time.
The thing that I hate is people conflating TDD with testing or unit testing. They're vastly different things. Also, I hate mocks. I spent so long learning all the test doubles to pass interviews: what's the difference between a spy, fake, stub, mock, etc. Also doing it with dependency injection and all that. I much prefer having an in-memory database than mock what a database does. Last company I worked at, I saw people write tests for what would happen if the API returned a 404 and they wrote code that would handle it and all that. In practice, our HTTP library would throw an exception not return with a statusCode of 404. Kinda funny.
You obviously can't always get replacements for things and you'll need to mock and I get that. I just prefer to not use them if I can.
Also, TDD advocates love saying, you're just not doing it well or you just don't know enough.
I get it, you love TDD and it works for you and more power to you.
I definitely believe in testing and having resilient tests that will minimize changes upon refactoring, but TDD doesn't work for me for most of the work I do. It works for some and I love it when it does, but yeah .... sorry random long ramble.
After many failed attempts at TDD, I realized/settled on test driven design, which is as simple as making sure what you're writing can be tested. I don't see writing the test first as a must, only good to have, but testable code is definitely a must.
This approach is so much easier and useful in real situations, which is anything more complicated than foo/bar. Most of the time, just asking an engineer how they plan to test it will make all the difference. I don't have to enforce my preference on anyone. I'm not restricting the team. I'm not creating a knowledge vacuum where only the seniors know how yo code and the juniors feel like they know nothing.
Just think how you plan to test it, anyone can do that.
How would you know what you're going to need or what it can do before you code it ?
I don't know if you're joking or not. I suppose tdd will help know what you need before you start.
Years of experience speaking:
- Make it work
- Make it right
- Make it fast
If your end results are following this pattern, no one gives a fuck how you do
It's definitely great in theory until you inherit a codebase with no tests, poor documentation, and numerous reported bugs already live in production. Even better if it was written by people hired because they could do other things better than they could code - which looking at some of the unlabeled wiring messes we were left, isn't saying a lot.
Good way to figure out how an unknown code base works is to add unit tests tho