TDD did not live up to expectations

Re:TDD did not live up to expectations by Retric on Thursday June 29, 2017 @12:20PM (#14664469)

Which is another way of saying TDD is somewhat usefull, if you start from a huge pile of code written by someone else.

When you think this might be going on, so if I do this it should work... then writing some tests will help decide if your assumptions or your code is wrong. Most importantly you are probably writing minimal code in those situations so the overhead of tests is minimized.

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Re:TDD did not live up to expectations by nostrademons on Thursday June 29, 2017 @12:25PM (#14664532)

Or even just a clear spec from a customer who knows what they want.

The challenge in most of the software industry is that the customer does not know what they want, and oftentimes it isn't even clear who the customer is. TDD is great if you can define your problem well enough to write tests for it up-front. Most software problems with a decent economic return are not like that.

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Re:TDD did not live up to expectations by seanmcdirmid on Thursday June 29, 2017 @01:45PM (#14665283)

I would say that the primary job of a modern developer is actually to figure out what the spec really is. Implementing the spec is easy in comparison. More often than not, "bugs" are errors in the spec that TDD of course has no hope of catching.

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Re:TDD did not live up to expectations by marcosdumay on Thursday June 29, 2017 @02:35PM (#14665755)

TDD is useful if you start from a well defined specification. The better defined, the more useful it is, starting from a big negative utility when you don't know your problem.

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