In my previous rant post on TDD I’ve argued that the majority of the problems many experience doing TDD are caused by testing in too narrow scopes - using classes as units of testability, instead of functional use cases. However, widening the scope of the test too much is just another extreme. So how one finds the sweet spot? In this post I’d like to share the heuristic that I use.
TDD: What Went Wrong…Or Did It?
Test Driven Development has been praised by our industry’s aficionados for a long time. However, lately there have been many harsh words said towards TDD, as it’s being blamed for causing bad software design and not keeping many of its promises. This trend culminated in David Heinemeierhansson’s post “TDD is dead. Long live testing”.
How is it possible, that the same technique, which is so advantageous to so many developers, is so disastrous to others? In this post I want to talk about 3 misconceptions that might explain this phenomenon.
Let’s start with the subtlest and most destructive one.
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