• Vlyn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    TDD is great when you have a very narrow use case, for example an algorithm. Where you already know beforehand: If I throw A in B should come out. If I throw B in C should come out. If I throw Z in an error should be thrown. And so on.

    For that it’s awesome, which is mostly algorithms.

    In real CRUD apps though? You have to write the actual implementation before the tests. Because in the tests you have to mock all the dependencies you used. Come up with fake test data. Mock functions from other classes you aren’t currently testing and so on. You could try TDD for this, but then you probably spend ten times longer writing and re-writing tests :-/

    After a while it boils down to: Small unit tests where they make sense. Then system wide integration tests for complex use-cases.

    • b1ab@lem.monster
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      1 year ago

      Totally agree.

      I think we should all strive to do better. Unit tests, mock-ups, UX design, 2 week sprints with actual working deliverables, well documented use cases, every thing neatly stacked in Jira, dev,test,staging,prod environments, continuous integration and every thing else we are told to do.

      Then reality sets in……

      With all that said, 25 years as a dev, this utopian environment is almost impossible to find unless forced by regulatory compliance. Medical devices, life critical systems, etc. or if you have big piles of money.

      • zib@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        In my experience, those things tend to be forced by project managers who believe the highest law of the land is proper scrum. Unsurprisingly, this makes all the devs miserable with no way to change anything because “this is just how it’s done”.

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      then you probably spend ten times longer writing and re-writing tests

      This is always what I’ve seen personally when people use TDD. And it’s worse because the inevitable time crunch towards the end of the project means the developers stop maintaining the tests, which renders all of the work put into the tests up to that point useless.

    • ahal@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It’s also great for bug fixes. Write that sucker first and you have an easy way to reproduce the issue and check whether it’s fixed.

      • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I’m constantly recommending junior devs to use TDD specifically for this. I don’t recommend it for anything else. If they don’t write the test first, it’s possible that the test will end up testing the wrong thing and thus they can’t be sure they really did fix the bug.

        Sometimes it’s hard to tell where to write the test ahead of time, so sometimes a slight variation I do is to write the test after (usually because it was such a struggle to figure out where the bug is), but when I’m testing it, I’ll comment out the fix or whatever and make sure the test fails.

    • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I mean, it sounds more like “The messier your project, the more difficult the unit testing”. What you’re describing sounds like issues with SRP and LoD. Which will inevitably happen as big projects get rushed, but let’s place the blame where it belongs: rushing.

      Yes unit tests take longer up front, but for projects that you need to update and maintain for a long time, they’re a huge boon.

      You can’t do everything with a unit test obviously.

    • evatronic@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I always start with the basics for my test cases. Like, every test case has a name, and assert(true) in the body.

  • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Works great when you know what your doing before you start. That never actually happens in real life though.

    • Zalack@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      And often if you box yourself into an API before you start implementing, it comes out worse.

      I always learn a lot about the problem space once I start coding, and use that knowledge to refine the API of my system as I work.

    • takeda@szmer.info
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      1 year ago

      Exactly, from my experience, most of the time (primarily when I need to do something new) I start writing code, when it starts working then I am starting to refractor it so it doesn’t look like crap.

      Perhaps TDD would make sense, when before any actual work starts, we would have POC phase to understand what needs to be done.

  • lobut@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I like TDD in theory and I spent so many years trying to get it perfect. I remember going to a conference where someone was teaching TDD while writing tic tac toe. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t finish in time.

    The thing that I hate is people conflating TDD with testing or unit testing. They’re vastly different things. Also, I hate mocks. I spent so long learning all the test doubles to pass interviews: what’s the difference between a spy, fake, stub, mock, etc. Also doing it with dependency injection and all that. I much prefer having an in-memory database than mock what a database does. Last company I worked at, I saw people write tests for what would happen if the API returned a 404 and they wrote code that would handle it and all that. In practice, our HTTP library would throw an exception not return with a statusCode of 404. Kinda funny.

    You obviously can’t always get replacements for things and you’ll need to mock and I get that. I just prefer to not use them if I can.

    Also, TDD advocates love saying, you’re just not doing it well or you just don’t know enough.

    I get it, you love TDD and it works for you and more power to you.

    I definitely believe in testing and having resilient tests that will minimize changes upon refactoring, but TDD doesn’t work for me for most of the work I do. It works for some and I love it when it does, but yeah … sorry random long ramble.

    • tvbusy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      After many failed attempts at TDD, I realized/settled on test driven design, which is as simple as making sure what you’re writing can be tested. I don’t see writing the test first as a must, only good to have, but testable code is definitely a must.

      This approach is so much easier and useful in real situations, which is anything more complicated than foo/bar. Most of the time, just asking an engineer how they plan to test it will make all the difference. I don’t have to enforce my preference on anyone. I’m not restricting the team. I’m not creating a knowledge vacuum where only the seniors know how yo code and the juniors feel like they know nothing.

      Just think how you plan to test it, anyone can do that.

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I had a coworker who was big into TDD. He was using it on a disaster project that was way over budget and long overdue. I was sitting in on a meeting between him and the client when he tried to defend the project’s status by saying “you don’t understand - we’ve written six times as much test code as actual code!” The client almost punched him.

      IMO it doesn’t matter what methodology you use if a) you don’t have the ability to understand what the client actually needs, and 2) you can’t code your way out of a paper bag (or to put it more technically, if you over-architect your solution and then can’t solve all the self-inflicted problems you run into).

      • fiah@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        a) you don’t have the ability to understand what the client actually needs

        the client doesn’t understand either. This I have had to learn to accept and not blame the client for, it’s OK and we’ll figure it out together

        b) if you over-architect your solution

        we can’t figure out what we actually need by overarchitecting something to death. If and when you find you’ve coded yourself into a corner because you didn’t architect well enough 6 months ago, then congratulations it seems like what you’re doing is good because you’ve made enough progress to actually need a better architecture

        obviously I’m oversimplifying and people more experienced than me understand better how to walk the tightrope between unmaintainable spaghetti and an overengineered mess, but me, I try to keep shit as simple as possible because you never know

      • Fedora@lemmy.haigner.me
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        1 year ago

        Time spent on tests is time saved in debugging, firefighting, troubleshooting, etc. If the project breaks down with a simple change, then tests also save the sanity of developers, and allows them to refactor the architecture.

    • anar@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      This reminds me when a senior engineer asked me to write exception handling on a one-off python script, not a production code - just a script devs can use internally. The “handling” was that the program should exit when a file is not found. He wanted me to try the file open, except the file error, print “file not found” message and exit(1).

      Guess what, genius. Python already does that for you. No need to write an extra wrapper needlessly.

    • mr_tyler_durden@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I much prefer having an in-memory database than mock what a database does.

      Which sounds great in theory but then you get to find where your prod DB and testing DB differ and you have to keep chasing that. Unless you are using something like SQLite which has both (disk and in-memory) as an option.

      I worked at a place that used a different in-memory DB (H2, IIRC) in place of our MySQL DB for testing. It ended up being hell to maintain and had to have hacks for how H2 and MySQL differ (tests would work in H2 but fail if run against MySQL or vice versa).

    • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Also, I hate mocks. I spent so long learning all the test doubles to pass interviews: what’s the difference between a spy, fake, stub, mock, etc.

      Oh good grief. I haven’t even heard of half of those, and I’ve been writing code longer than most interviewers.

      Also doing it with dependency injection and all that.

      After struggling with several DI frameworks, I’ve come to the conclusion that DI is far too opaque and unpredictable to be useful.

      OOP is also intentionally opaque, mind you, but debuggers can see through it if necessary, so that’s fine. DI, on the other hand, is opaque even to debuggers!

      I much prefer having an in-memory database than mock what a database does.

      I much prefer using the same DBMS for tests as the one used in production. That way, I can use its special features (like arrays as query parameters), and avoid bugs resulting from differences between DBMSes (which would only appear in production).

      You obviously can’t always get replacements for things and you’ll need to mock and I get that. I just prefer to not use them if I can.

      Indeed, and you usually can. Even if your system involves a bunch of services that normally run on different machines, who says you can’t spin up instances of them as part of the test? Tests are arbitrary code and can do anything that any other program can do, including starting subprocesses. Just be sure to terminate them once the test is finished, even if it fails.

    • pkulak@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I like to mock up dependencies with Docker Compose, then run all the tests against that. Keep the compose file in the repo, of course. I don’t tend to build a lot of real unit tests unless I’m doing something very novel and self contained. When you’re just assembling a service out of REST libraries and databases, integration testing is mostly what you want.

  • VanillaGorilla@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    With my stakeholders TDD is nearly impossible. I mean it’s possible, but doesn’t make sense as they shuffle their specifications every other day. I implement, they decide they wanted something different, I refactor, they don’t like it, I refactor, they accept, I write tests.

    Please send help

  • SmoothSurfer@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Years of experience speaking:

    • Make it work
    • Make it right
    • Make it fast

    If your end results are following this pattern, no one gives a fuck how you do

  • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I write my code, comment it out, write tests that fail, then uncomment my code, then do the proper TDD loop. Some folks get too strict about the process at the beginning saying that that a test that doesn’t compile is still a failing test. My brain doesn’t work like that.

  • amio@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    It’s criminally underutilized. Of course, one reason is that it’s hard to TDD a moving target. Since it’s also hard to get people to actually fucking specify things in a lot of real world cases, it’s just one more thing you ought to do, but aren’t allowed to.

    • Notnotmike@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I think you have a point with the moving target, but also I believe that development should pretty much always be a moving target. You should be refactoring your domain based on new experiences and new knowledge all the time. So, personally, I find integration tests much more useful, because they test the input and output of a system, rather than how it’s implemented. I can change my domain without having to modify my tests and that makes changes to the domain much simpler.

      That being said, I also definitely recognize the advantages of TDD, I just don’t think it’s a silver bullet; there’s good projects for it and bad ones

    • Spike@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      There’s some things called software architecture, requirement engineering and software design. More dev teams should try this.

    • noodle@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      You don’t write a whole app in tests and then write the whole app in code, you make tests for the functionality as you go.

    • Hexorg@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      The Test part of TDD isn’t meant to encompass your whole need before developing the application. It’s function-by function based. It also forces you to not have giant functions. Let’s say you’re making a compiler. First you need to parse text. Idk what language structure we are doing yet but first we need to tokenize our steam. You write a test that inputs hello world into your tokenizer then expects two tokens back. You start implementing your tokenizer. Repeat for parser. Then you realize you need to tokenize numbers too. So you go back and make a token test for numbers.

      So you don’t need to make all the tests ahead of time. You just expand at the smallest test possible.

      • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        It also forces you to not have giant functions.

        No, being unable to read giant functions is what forces me not to have giant functions.

        • Hexorg@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          My friend, let me tell you a story during my studies when I had to help someone find a bug in their 1383-line long main() in C… on the other hand I think Ill spare you from the gruesome details, but it took me 30 hours.

          • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Case in point, actually. Whenever I’m forced to write a giant function, I always get nervous because it could be crawling with bugs that I have little hope of spotting.

  • Gnubyte@lemdit.com
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    1 year ago

    Write code to test your code then repl build and run it anyways and smoketest it to see if it actually works

    Sounds like activities for people who don’t have real work to do. These tech layoffs cut deep because there was so much fluff in the industry. I sort of blame these companies that marketed devops too hard and oversold overcomplicated solutions, but it’s also the fault of the tech leads advising managers.

      • Gnubyte@lemdit.com
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        1 year ago

        For sure but it also depends on how deep your wallets are to invest in that. Whether that means literal compensation or just your time.

  • fence_prude@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Sounds like you either need to establish better task parameters or you need to gain more experience programming.

    • b1ab@lem.monster
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      1 year ago

      This is very true.

      Unfortunately most product managers SUCK at designing or making software.

      Agile tries to fix this be supporting frequent iteration.

      Unfortunately most programmers SUCK at writing good code.

      TDD tries to fix this by forcing the consideration of end results (testing) at the beginning. It forces programmers and product teams to actually think and work. Make clear design decisions earlier on, but not to the point of waterfall.

      It’s just a giant cesspool of failure due to human laziness that usually falls on the shoulders of QA.

      Bottom line, making good software is hard. It takes time. But the market won’t support slow development. The business and sales teams remind me of Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka.