Re:"Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck
by swombat on Wednesday February 04, 2009 @05:15AM
(#465539)
Are you objecting to cultish behaviour like TATFT (Test All The F'ing Time), or to comprehensive testing in general?
Also, are you objecting only to low-level unit tests, or to "integration tests" as well? (i.e. unit tests with a much larger "unit")
I don't TATFT. My metric for deciding what tests to write is "is it likely to break in a non-obvious manner?" If a breakage in this code will cause the application not to run at all, there's not all that much point in testing that. However, if the code is likely to result in some weird errors that will be hard to track down, I feel writing tests is a very good investment.
Also, are you objecting only to low-level unit tests, or to "integration tests" as well? (i.e. unit tests with a much larger "unit")
I don't TATFT. My metric for deciding what tests to write is "is it likely to break in a non-obvious manner?" If a breakage in this code will cause the application not to run at all, there's not all that much point in testing that. However, if the code is likely to result in some weird errors that will be hard to track down, I feel writing tests is a very good investment.