sketerpot comments on Coding Rationally - Test Driven Development - Less Wrong
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Test-driven development is a common subject of affective death spirals, and this post seems to be the product of one. In general, programmers ought to write more unit tests than they usually do, but not everything should be unit tested, and unit testing alone is absolutely not sufficient to ensure good code or good abstractions.
Writing tests is not free; it takes time, and while it often pays for itself, there are plenty of scenarios where it doesn't. Time is a limited resource which is also spent on thinking about abstractions, coding, refactoring, testing by hand, documenting and many other worthy activities. The amount of time required to write a unit test depends on the software environment, and the specific thing being tested. Things that involve interactions crossing out of your program's domain, like user interfaces, tend to be hard to test automatically. The amount of time required to write a test is not guaranteed to be reasonable. The benefits of a test also vary, depending on the thing being tested. Trivially simple code is not worth testing; for example, it would be wrong to test Java getters and setters except as an implicit part of a larger test.
One of the best examples of when TDD doesn't apply is when you're writing a version 0 that you expect to throw away, just to get a feel for what you should have done. When you do that, screw extensive test suites and elegance and maintainability; you just want to get something working as quickly as you can, so that you can get quickly to the part where you rewrite from scratch.
Often you can't really know what the issues are until you've already run afoul of them. Exploratory programming is a way of getting to that point, fast. You can bring out the tests when you've got a project (or piece of a project) that you're pretty sure you'll be using for a while.
There are two problems with this idea. First, I've found TDD to be extraordinarily effective at helping break down a problem that I have no idea how to solve. That is, if I don't even know what to sketch, I sometimes start with the tests. (Test-Driven Development By Example has some good examples of when/why you'd do that.)
Second: we can be really bad at guessing whether or not something will get thrown away. Rarely does version 0 really get thrown away, and so by the time you've built up a bunch of code, the odds that you'll go back and write the tests are negligible.
That's a choice. Some of us deliberately throw away the first draft for anything that matters, no exceptions.