[alexval]

My first job I wrote c++ for a win32 desktop app. I hated unit testing. My workflow was write the code, compile it, trigger the scenario, step through the code, write some unit tests after I knew it worked. It was the expectation on my team to write UTs so I did it. Fast forward to a different team I learned from a co-worker how UTs can help you influence your design. If you find yourself doing a ton of frustrating work to set up your UT scenarios there's probably a way of fixing the design to be less coupled that would allow you to test the code better. Now I think of UTs more as a way to help me understand how the design of my code is working and I get some extra validation out of it as well.

[pjmlp]

My trick question to TDD advocates is how to develop native apps following those principles, after all no GUI change is allowed without a test.

[magduf]

GUIs don't lend themselves to unit testing at all, because the requirements aren't mathematical, but are instead based on human factors.

For GUIs, the proper approach is to unit-test the functionality underneath, not the GUI itself.

[pjmlp]

Which leads to convoluted architectures just to be able to follow "only write code which there is a failing test for".

[romwell]

How are these convoluted?

After all, any program out there does something. If you know what it's doing, you know what it should do, and what it shouldn't. That means you can test it.

[pjmlp]

Because given how GUI frameworks are implemented, one needs to add explicit workarounds to follow "only write code for which there is a failing test".

After all, writing the test needs to be possible, to start with.

So adapters, views, commands and what have you need to exist only to fulfill such purpose, and even then, their interactions with the GUI layer don't get tested.

So one is creating them, without knowing if they are the right elements for the GUI layout.

Hence why testing, 100% behind it, TDD not so much.

[AnimalMuppet]

In my book, the UI isn't part of unit testing - at least, the views aren't. The models and controllers (to use the MVC paradigm) might be, though.