Again With The Test Driven Development
So, if you’re lucky, you’ve mostly missed another Internet pile-up about unit tests and so on, this one started by Joel Spolsky and some comments he made on his podcast.
I’ve already written a little bit about what Joel said, and I don’t want to rehash that. But I have seen a recurring theme in arguments that testing is overrated — namely that the testing that those people are writing about doesn’t seem to be related to the testing that I actually do.
I’m going to put the summary up front:
- “Unit Testing” and “Test Driven Development” are not identical concepts
- It would seem, on the available evidence, that those of use who are TDD or BDD backers haven’t done a great job of explaining this.
- TDD has code quality benefits that are completely separate from whatever function it has as a code verification engine.
- It would seem, on the available evidence, that those of use who are TDD or BDD backers have done a really poor job of explaining this.








