When you shouldn't bother unit testing

Re:When you shouldn't bother unit testing by thirsteh on Friday May 17, 2013 @09:35AM (#5724199)

Then test-driven development defies common sense. Its whole point is to write a runnable specification in the form of a test suite before you write the actual code.

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Re:When you shouldn't bother unit testing by kleiba on Friday May 17, 2013 @09:38AM (#5724217)

...which can have its benefits, but can also go terribly wrong if you get lost.

(Case in point, Peter Norvig comments on a famous series of TDD blog posts that had the goal of writing a Sudoku solver, but ultimately failed:

"And I could see, right from the start, you put these two together, and you could solve this Sudoku thing. He didn’t know that so he was sort of blundering in the dark even though all his code “worked” because he had all these test cases."

http://pindancing.blogspot.com.au/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-a...)

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Re:When you shouldn't bother unit testing by thirsteh on Friday May 17, 2013 @09:40AM (#5724227)

Definitely. I'm not a big fan of TDD myself. I think that an advanced system can add a lot of the same checks, leaving you to do just the scrutinous testing via e.g. QuickCheck.

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