alt Hacker NewsThere is supposedly a famous video series of Uncle Bob trying and failing to solve sudoku with TDD. He did not read any guides on solving it and tried from first principles instead, and bounced off of it.
It’s clear to me that if you don’t know what you’re building, testing it first has rubber duck value that can easily be overshadowed by Sunk Cost. I always test my pillars - the bits of the problem that are definite and which I will build off of.
Yes, starting with tests without market fit can also be fatal. But calling anything done without tests is just a slower poison. Before you airlift your brain to another unrelated problem you need to codify some of your assumptions. If you’re good at testing you can write them in a manner that makes it easy to delete them when requirements change. But that takes practice a lot of people don’t have because they avoid writing tests or they write the exact same kinds of tests for years at a time without every stretching their skills.
If you’re not writing tests you’re not writing good ones when you do. Testing is part of CI and the whole philosophy of CI is do the painful parts until you either grow callouses or get fed up and file off the scratchy bits. To avoid testing is to forget the face of your father.
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Not Bob Martin, sudoku with TDD was Ron Jeffries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033446 - Linking to this old comment because it links to each of Ron's articles, a discussion about it, and Norvig's version.
> Yes, starting with tests without market fit can also be fatal. But calling anything done without tests is just a slower poison.
I think we are pretty close to agreement here. I'd be interested in what you have experienced in the realm of front-end testing though - whether you think things are just as cut and dried in that realm (that's another discussion though).
And I'll also accept the point about skill in test writing that improves the cost-benefit analysis. I'll also cop to not having that kind of practiced ability at testing to the level I would personally like. But it's chicken / egg. A lot of folks get their start at scrappy start ups that can't attract the best talent. And just can't afford to let their devs invest in their skills in this way. Hell - even established companies just grind their devs without letting them learn the shit they need to learn.
I feel a victim of this to some degree - and am combating it with time off work which I can afford at the moment. One of the things I'm working on is just understanding testing better - y'know, so I can in the future write a SKILL.md file that tells Claude what sort of tests it should write. lol...