Re:Test-Driven Development is Stupid
by TeMPOraL on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @08:31AM
(#10620566)
And, as the article points out nicely, this basically prevents people from refactoring their code. In any nontrivial codebase, when you have a lot of tests, then what would have been 15 minutes of work rearranging class structure turns into a whole day of rearranging test cases to fit the architecture again.
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It can be, I won't entirely disagree. But it depends how highly coupled your unit tests are to the design.
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.