alt Hacker NewsIt's... really the same problem when you hire people to just write tests. A lot of time it just confirms that the code does what the code does. Having clear specs of what the code should do make things better and clearer.
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tibbar • yesterday at 7:45 PM
a lot of the value of tests is confirming that the system hasn't regressed beyond the behavior at the original release. It's bad if the original release is wrong, but a separate issue is if the system later accidentally stops behaving the way it did originally.
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aray07 • yesterday at 7:33 PM
yup agree - i think have specs and then do verifications against the spec. I have heard that this is how a lot of consulting firms work - you have acceptance criterias and thats how work is validated.
Yep, tests written after the fact are just verifying tautologies.
> Most teams don't [write tests first] because thinking through what the code should do before writing it takes time they don't have.
It's astonishing to me how much our industry repeats the same mistakes over and over. This doesn't seem like what other engineering disciplines do. Or is this just me not knowing what it looks like behind the curtain of those fields?