I'm not sure. The TDD stuff always seemed pretty cultish to me. Maybe I just work on weird programs. I work on two kinds of system.
System-type #1 is one where we're exploring a technical idea, and we don't know what's going to work or how or anything. So it's pure implementation. There's no "interface". It's a technical experiment. We write tests, and those are all hypotheses. Not "requirements".
System-type #2 is a language or machine tool of which there's a well understood set of requirements. They're expressed in terms of a very detailed spec and a ginormous testsuite (tens of thousands of cases), every one of which is completely non-negotiable. These systems typically acquire secondary testsuites as they mature -- the regression suite, the performance suite, etc. -- but again, there tends to be no room for misunderstanding: regression tests are bugs, performance tests are scalar measurements.
In both type of system, the implementation is the meat of the problem; the "surface area" (while typically infinite) is not something we spend any time with customers or "system-consumers" arguing over. So I think the brow-beating about using one or another "TDD methodology" variant ... is directed at a different kind of software?
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Date: 2009-05-29 04:22 am (UTC)System-type #1 is one where we're exploring a technical idea, and we don't know what's going to work or how or anything. So it's pure implementation. There's no "interface". It's a technical experiment. We write tests, and those are all hypotheses. Not "requirements".
System-type #2 is a language or machine tool of which there's a well understood set of requirements. They're expressed in terms of a very detailed spec and a ginormous testsuite (tens of thousands of cases), every one of which is completely non-negotiable. These systems typically acquire secondary testsuites as they mature -- the regression suite, the performance suite, etc. -- but again, there tends to be no room for misunderstanding: regression tests are bugs, performance tests are scalar measurements.
In both type of system, the implementation is the meat of the problem; the "surface area" (while typically infinite) is not something we spend any time with customers or "system-consumers" arguing over. So I think the brow-beating about using one or another "TDD methodology" variant ... is directed at a different kind of software?