[jayd16]

The lesson is more about the degree of churn and how game rules are not hard rules. A valid base 9 number system is NOT a design goal and doing that work can be a waste.

It's like testing that the website landing page is blue. Sure you can but breaking that rule is certainly valid and you'll end up ripping out a lot of tests that way.

Now, instead of calcifying the designer's whims, testing should be focused around things that actually need to make sense, ie abstract systems, data structures etc etc.

[fwlr]

Tests that “calcify the designer’s whims” - great way to put it - can be quite useful if your job description happens to be “carrying out the whims of the designer” (and for many of us, it is!)

With high coverage and dry-ish tests, changing the tests first and seeing which files start failing can function as a substitute for find+replace - by altering the tests to reflect the whims, it’ll tell you all the places you need to change your code to express said whims.