[adrianhoward]

He also seems to misunderstand TDD - which is more about design than testing. Unit testing and TDD are not synonymous. You can, and I certainly do, test-drive code over traditional unit test boundaries.

He also seems completely unaware that there is an entire school of TDD/BDD that doesn't really like mock objects (the Chicago vs London school http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/123627/what-a...).

I've just generally stopped listening to what he says on the topic. It doesn't seem to match the reality of what folk actually do.

[mcphage]

> He also seems to misunderstand TDD - which is more about design than testing. Unit testing and TDD are not synonymous.

Actually I think it's more his critics which misunderstand this—he argues against TDD, and he doesn't think unit testing is sufficient, but he doesn't argue against testing, or unit testing.

[dragonwriter]

> he argues against TDD, and he doesn't think unit testing is sufficient

But what he describes as "TDD" to argue against it isn't TDD (either in his description of its substance or his description of its rationale), and what he describes as "unit testing" to argue that it isn't sufficient isn't unit testing (again, either in substance or rationale.)

> but he doesn't argue against testing, or unit testing.

He specifically argues that unit testing should be deemphasized if not outright eliminated, and that the reason for this is the elimination of test-first as a design practice. So, yes, he does argue against unit testing (of course, the argument is nonsense, since unit testing was an important practice before test-first practices, and test-first practices are independent of kind of testing -- sure, TDD emphasizes unit test first, but ATDD/BDD focus on acceptance test first; moving toward or away from test-first as a practice is completely orthogonal to the degree of focus on unit testing vs. other kinds of testing.)