[richardjordan]

The comments section today looks like a support group for beginners/intermediates who struggled with TDD and gave up, and so want to explain why it's all bunk. I get this. I am not a great programmer. I'm self taught like a lot of you. I had tremendous difficulty grokking TDD and for the longest time I'd start, give up, build without it.

But, I'm here as a you-can-do-it-to. You might not think you want to but I'm so glad I DID manage to get there.

Feel free to ignore because I respect that everyone's experience differs. But the real problem is that there are few good step by step tutorials that teach you from start to competent with TDD. Couple that with the fact that it takes real time to learn good TDD practices and the vast majority of TDDers in their early stage write too many tests, bad tests, and tightly couple tests.

Just as it's taken you time to learn programming - I don't mean hello world, but getting to the competent level with coding you're at today, it'll take a long time to get good with TDD. My case (ruby ymmv) involved googling every time I struggled; lots of Stack Overflow; plenty of Confreaks talks; Sandi Metz' POODR...

Like the OP says - at different stages in the learning cycles you take different approaches because you're better, it's more instinctive to you. I thought I understood the purpose of mocks/doubles, until I actually understood the purpose of mocks/doubles. When used right they're fantastic.

The key insight that everyone attempting TDD has to grok, before all else, is that it's about design not regression testing. If you're struggling to write tests, and they're hard to write, messy, take a lot of setup, are slow to run, too tightly coupled etc. you have a design problem. It's exposed. Think through your abstractions. Refactor. Always refactor. Don't do RED-GREEN-GOOD ENOUGH ... I did for a long time. It was frustrating.

This is a good post. Don't dismiss TDD because you're struggling. Try to find better learning tools and practice lots and listen to others who are successful with it.

It's true that sometimes fads take hold and we can dismiss them as everyone doing something for no reason. But cynicism can take hold too and we can think that of everything and miss good tools and techniques. TDD will help you be a better coder - at least it has me. If your first response to this post was TDD is bullshit, give it another try.

[bphogan]

This is really right on the money. If it's too hard to test then you've already found something really valuable - a problem with your design that will cause you friction later on.

That itself might be worth a ton to you.

[collyw]

"If you're struggling to write tests, and they're hard to write, messy, take a lot of setup, are slow to run, too tightly coupled etc. you have a design problem."

This is my problem exactly, and I wouldn't say I have a design problem. My application is a Django app that return complex database query results. Creating the fixtures for ALL of the edge cases would take significantly longer than writing the code. At this stage it is far more efficient to take a copy of the production database and check things manually. It helps that my app is in house only, and so users will report straight away when something isn't working.

But to say that I have a design problem because tests are going to be difficult to implement is just plain wrong.

[richardjordan]

sure... it can be more broadly stated "you have a design problem and/or you're testing the wrong things"