clog

I started phasing into a TDD workflow about year and a half ago. It took awhile to learn. Fixtures and test:unit were the tools of the time (so 2006). I didn’t see much about mocking, stubbing, or even factories until I started getting into Rspec about 5 months ago. TDD definitely improved the quality of my code but it slowed me down. I started programming with BASIC in 1984 after all (TI-99 ftw) so I have over twenty years worth of habits to overcome. Even now the amount of time I have spent doing functional programming dwarfs everything else.

Developers in particular must learn how to constantly adapt. Software Engineering has a long way to go and phase-gate/serial cycles aren’t the direction it needs to go in. Unfortunately there is a lot of resistance to changes in programming languages and methodologies. Most people cling to the old ways, the ways they were thought. A professor they respected told them to UML model every detail before starting to code so that’s what they do. Most people don’t want to constantly re-learn how to do their job. If they’re a developer then they need to find a new career path. We need to learn better ways of doing things and TDD is one of the most important improvements.

These days I’m doing 100% TDD and will never go back. I finally have the work flow down and not only has my code quality dramatically improved, so has velocity. My team is doing all TDD now and we burn through development at amazing speed. Our QA team almost never finds any defects because the developers are just as thorough during the TDD process. It took awhile to get to this point, but TDD doesn’t slow me down anymore - it helps catapult me ahead.

How many times have you received a hunk of completely untested code? Yeah I lost count too. I imagine your experiences were like mine, I bunch of mangled code that made little or no sense that really just needed to be tossed. Instead you have to black box it and put in a bunch of wrapper functionality. It’s legacy code. We’ve all experienced legacy code and it sucks. The really sad part is that we all wrote the same type of code that others are now wrestling with.

Untested code is legacy code. Everyone seems to assume that OLD code is legacy code. This isn’t true. C now isn’t much different from what C was 30 years ago. If code written in C a long time ago came with a complete testing suite, then all you would need to do is get it compiling and running. After that you can gradually make changes and rely on the tests to help lead the way. Inheriting Java code from 2 years ago is no different. If it doesn’t have tests, it’s almost certainly going to be legacy code. That means black boxes, wrappers and pain.

TDD ensures maintainability, provides documentation, helps in the design process, exposes architectural flaws early (you might think you’re an awesome coder but, trust me - you still have them) and (once you get it down) actually speeds up development. It also gives your code a life support system. Someone that comes along several years later should be able to pick up where you left off.

Give it a try and stick with it (if you haven’t already). It’s the only way to roll.