The Problem With Unit Testing

http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/224053080/the-problem-with-unit-testing

by andreyf • 17 years ago

4 2 17 years ago

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danek• 17 years ago

i like unit tests only after my design has solidified.

they are a big slow-down when i'm doing exploratory programming and getting a feel for the problem. but after i've figured out how it all works together, i'm cool with writing them to ferret out errors and stop regressions.

TwoSheds• 17 years ago

Yet another article which claims that development is faster without Unit Tests. I used to be a cowboy-coder in the past for years, and now I always do Unit Tests. My experience is that it's always faster unless I'm just doing small API exploring which I throw away. Without tests I always end up debugging longer than I would have spent if I'd written the tests.

And the future maintainer has much better chance of determining whether whether certain behavior in my legacy code is a bug or feature - desired or accidental.

I don't think these guys have done any serious TDD or Unit Testing projects. They have just tried to write some tests and then they have given up because they just thought it's too hard and their tests were probably huge, testing too much and not really maintainable.

The Problem With Unit Testing

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