On 04/06/13 22:29, Jeroen De Dauw wrote:
Hey,
Because of this, I can be fairly confident in recommending thata my
team avoids the use of TDD.
Clearly you are not a fan of TDD. Which is entirely fine. If you adopt this practice or not is a personal choice, and not one that should be forced upon anyone. Like with all practices, effectiveness varies depending on the people and the environment. You are however writing tests for most of your code I hope? MediaWiki hack a serious lack of tests, and we are paying the cost of that, if you realize this or not, so be careful with what you recommend.
The studies were comparing writing unit tests before writing code with writing unit tests after writing code. Coverage was not equivalent, but nobody is saying there should be no unit tests.
My position on unit testing is like I said in my original post. I think it is essential for complex code, with decreasing gains as code becomes simpler. So I decide whether or not to write a unit test for a given module based on a cost/benefit analysis.
-- Tim Starling