Sunday, January 6, 2019

Test-Driven Development - you are doing it wrong!

Test-Driven Development is one of those techniques that somehow is not as widely used as it should be. I know a lot of developers who can agree on the benefits it brings. Yet the same developers, when asked about practicing TDD, answer: “it does not work for me”.
When I tried to understand the “why” behind this statement, they start to struggle to find an explanation. They say they only add simple features. They say their application is not that complex. They have no time. Many of them tried, but it was “too time-consuming”, it cost too much effort.

I pair with some of them. On a couple of occasions I had long conversations with them to understand how they were doing it? What went wrong? What’s the conclusion? In many cases, the problem lies in the basics - they simply tried to apply TDD to every newly created object.