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Jim Coplien and Bob Martin Debate TDD

alexsmail

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  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

163K views14 years ago1 recommendation

Tools and practiceSoftware designTestingSoftware architecture

Jim Coplien and Bob Martin debate the merits of test-driven development, unit testing, and upfront software architecture.

infoq.com/interviews/coplien-martin-tdd Bob Martin is also known as Uncle Bob. He is an Agile Manifesto author, and author of books on Agile Programming, XP, UML, Object Oriented Programming, and C++. Jim Coplien is a software pioneer in Object Oriented programming and C++ and multi-paradigm design. He is also co-author of DCI paradigm. Debate sprang up at JAOO '07 around Bob Martin's assertion that "nowadays it is irresponsible for a developer to ship a line of code he has not executed in a unit test." In this InfoQ video, he debated with Jim Coplien on this and other topics, including Design by Contract vs. TDD and how much up-front architecture is needed to keep a system consistent with the business domain model. See full transcription here alexsmail.blogspot.com/2012/10/tdd.html

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1 person recommends this

What people say. Engineers refer to this debate when discussing the trade-offs of strict TDD versus upfront design.

lobuton Hacker News • Recommends

On “TDD Doesn't Work”

Yeah, I agree. TDD is also, you cannot write a single line of code without writing a failing unit test though. Well, I'm not a fan of that either. I mean, sometimes I like writing an acceptance test to begin with and work inwards. People sometimes interchangeably use "TDD" for "testing". Also, just because you do TDD, doesn't mean your code can be great, I've seen people assert pointless things and the unit has gotten so small that people now define them as methods in classes. Which I also think can lead to some crazy maintenance suite of tests. If you're interested, this was a fun discussion about TDD between two professionals: link to this video Jim Coplien and Uncle Bob.
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lgunschon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Why Most Unit Testing is Waste [pdf]”

James Coplien and Bob Martin have a debate of TDD and unit testing. There is a video of it on YouTube: link to this video
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Ace17on Hacker News • Mentions

On “TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code”

I feel James Coplien's advice on the question is interesting: link to this video TLDW: "refactoring your way out" from a simple but too short-sighted design might take a ridiculous amount of work, compared what would have been necessary if you knew what a "correct" design for this problem was.
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