Obviously if you are against testing in general you are against TDD (it's just testing taken to the extreme).
I thought he at least was going to say that he preferred higher level testing, to low level unit tests (which can be a fair point, you can find 90% of the issues with 10% of the test code if you accept that you can't always isolate the failure based on the test report). But no. He is against testing.
If he thinks test driven development can produce horrible implementations then he's right, they can. But he's horribly wrong that the solution is to abandon unit testing.
Without unit tests developers begin to live in fear of parts of the code, and refuse to clean it up "in case it breaks something", and there's no way to verify those fears aren't founded.
Any refactoring job starts with annoying a lot of people by breaking things that previous worked and questions start to appear from people that "it used to work before" when some of those breakages slip through to the customer.
Refactoring becomes something to fear because "we'll have to retest everything" which is a large expense that cannot be afforded.
Absolutely this! Unit testing helps you during the dark years of maintenance phase, when you must fix a bug or add a new feature and you don't have the knowledge, nor the time, to build a full representation of the application in your head: you just touch as little code as possible to get the work done, and unit tests help to ensure that all the rest stays equal.
I know that in my own work, the single most important thing for me is to be able to massively refactor, restructure and redesign my and others' code, as I'm working with it (this is probably why I like dynamic languages and macros so much, and probably why I benefit from static typing so much); anything which gets in the way of deleting, reorganising, clarifying, duplicating, altering, reducing and shifting code is going to slow me down and make the resulting code worse.
Perhaps, though, there is a middle ground: while the internals of a library must be free to mutate, the external interface ought not to change nearly as much. Perhaps all unit tests should be written to test the external interface, not the internal details. That might also help avoid the tests-which-test-that-the-code-does-what-it-does disease.
I do really appreciate tests, and they do help detect and prevent certain types of regressions.
I reduced 20,000 lines of tests to 5,000, and caught a dozen bugs.
Having worked with dynamic languages quite a bit, I found that iff your language has a decent REPL, so you can code iteratively, you don't need unit tests to drive your design. You perform those tests in REPL yourself, which helps you flesh out the design, but you don't have layers of code that'll make changing the design harder.
The way I personally work with Lisp is a mix of writing code in a file, compiling particular parts of it and playing around with it in REPL until I've figured out the right design - at which point I may as well start adding some tests around tricky places. The idea is to not burden yourself with permanent tests until you have your design figured out.
Yes, this is the most useful approach to unit testing. If you have a functional interface which doesn't cause side effects, (i.e. state changes of any kind, external actions that can't really be effectively verified by test code, etc) then unit testing is very valuable and useful given you just test the interface using the simplest possible approach: a table of some inputs which should map to some outputs.
I'd go further and say you should always write the tests only after this interface has solidified. Test first makes sense only under either the assumption that your first design is always the best design, or that you are happy to spend the time to morph the tests, as well as the code when you realise your first design wasn't the best and have to iterate and tweak.
We all know from experience that the first assumption is never true. As for the second assumption, it may be true, but then the question becomes, well, why waste the time? You know those 'test-first' tests will just be rewritten anyway. Why not just write the tests last and save yourself a lot of wasted effort?
If you're developing something which must work 100% every time or else someone will die, then unit tests are a must.
If you're developing with people who break the build all the time, then unit tests are useful.
Unit tests that aren't 100% up to date with the code are worse than no unit tests.
If any piece doesn't succeed, the command stops. No push without unit tests passing.
Unit tests are a safety mechanism- you can easily bog yourself down with too many, tying things up in bad ways, or presuming a specific design. But do you really want to live with no safety at all?
The art, as I see it, lies in writing tests in such a way that you get the guarantees you need, the safety of not letting the next guy (or yourself) screw it all up during later changes while simultaneously not preventing you from doing needed refactoring.
It's a fun challenge.
If any test fails, it is because you broke it just now, so you go in and see if your test is broken, or, as is often the case, your refactored code is breaking the expected behaviour of the tested code.
A bit of a tautology... broken code is broken. Unmaintained code, even unit tests, should be deleted.
And he's lost me in his first sentence.
Unit testing, good unit testing at least, is not just about developing as it is about preventing regressions. A unit test that runs on every build ensure that something is true and that it stays true forever.