I just listened two different podcasts, an interview of Kent Beck at Software Engineering Radio and episode 1.0.3: Problems on "This Developer's Life". Few points which stuck into my mind while listening:
First on SE-Radio
- Scope of tests is something you have to decide yourself. TDD is not about unit testing. This means that you have to think about on what level you should write your tests. They can be acceptance tests, integration tests, unit tests or something else.
- Every test has costs and benefits. Costs are usually short term, and biggest benefits come on long term. So if you're doing some explorative coding, tests are not something you must write, because you might throw that code away before you can reap the benefits. But you've got to bite the bullet at some point, if you continue to use that code. So Beck isn't zealot on TDD.
-Software development is moving towards continuos deployment, and testability will become more and more important. Automated testing will become comparable to compiler, it'll give you feedback immediately.
On Problems episode, best quote was something like "Not all bugs need to be resolved". This meant that some bugs are in completely unnecessary features, so you'd be better if you threw away that troublesome feature.
Overall, both podcasts were great.
Kent Beck seems like a pretty level headed guy. He said at a Stackoveflow thread that he writes as few tests as needed for given level of confidence. Seems like a reasonable aproach.
VastaaPoista