I would not so sure about GO as is does not have generics.
In mu opinion Go has bad type system.
Check this post 
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DevTernity 2017: Ian Cooper - TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong
I find this talk isn’t defending TDD/BDD as it is commonly practiced. Yet it goes back to “the sources” (Test Driven Development: By Example (2002), Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (1999), Refactoring to Patterns (2005)) to discover the actual intent behind the original practices. In my opinion it ends up in a place aligned with Mocks and explicit contracts.
TLDNR: Test the behaviour of the “public API” - not the implementation details
It concludes with:
- The reason to test is a new behaviour, not a method on a class
- Write dirty code to get green, then refactor
- No new tests for refactored internals and privates (methods, classes)
- Both Develop and Accept against tests written on a port
- Add Integration test for coverage of ports to adapters
- Add system tests for end-to-end confidence
- Don’t mock internals, privates, or adapters
He does emphasize that when tests are used to discover a suitable implementation, those tests will have to be deleted in the end as they are coupled to the implementation details .
He uses the term Duct Tape Programmer quite a bit.
He also references the Fowler, Beck, DHH conversations on Is TDD Dead?.
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That would be me in a job interview where I was asked to do TDD in a team of “software craftsmen” (credits:
https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/1022109902918086661)
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Yes. I find that even in C++, with care, one can use the type system to eliminate most of the trivial bugs. And of course languages like Scala& Rust (Haskell, OCaml etc) are designed to force that rather than merely allow it.
Coplien’s points are interesting.
#1 I think is the strongest point and is definitely what bothers me the most–TDD absolutely focuses on minutiae, from beginning to end. I remember having the corporate “agile coach” visit our team for a day of training. We were presented a problem, toy in scope but with enough subtleties to make it interesting, and of course I immediately started thinking about data representation & API. After we worked on it a bit, TDD was introduced, we were instructed to throw out our work so far and start writing tests, then make them pass. At the end of this the instructor crowed “now, see how different your data structure is”. Well, no, actually, mine wasn’t–a good data design was still good 
If you have a framework designed for a specific domain, and you have a problem in that domain, and the framework is good and fits your problem well, then all you have left to worry about is minutiae. I think that describes a lot of classic RoR applications back in the days before SPA and real-time distributed updates were things. So I think that specific applicability contributed a whole lot to the popularity of TDD.
The problem is, training people in that focus leaves them unable to recognize where the big picture of the framework no longer fits well with the big-picture needs of an app. This is a huge blindspot for developers, leading them to struggle against the design of their tools.
Having said all that, I did find that some training on TDD gave me a new perspective that is useful: thinking about testability when I’m thinking about data types and APIs. It’s not really a different set of criteria, but thinking about it sometimes helps me find an opportunity for decoupling or decomposition which I had missed.
#2 is right, and design by contract is something that really should be taught as part of TDD, but sadly seems not to be–I suspect some of us would object to TDD less if it taught working out the contracts first rather than jumping right into tests aimed scattershot at whatever minutiae of the API we happen to come up with before we really think through the API (or, put another way, Liskov nailed it before most TDD proponents were born and people ought to still be reading Abstraction and Specification in Program Development).
#3 as stated is wrong for 2 reasons, yet still correct in spirit. First TDD does find and correct errors in the application code, second most test errors (in my experience) simply fail to find application errors but not introduce new ones. So it does not double the errors in your running code. However, the point still stands that programmers will commit errors in test code, and this will necessarily limit the effectiveness of TDD to be less than what its evangelists claim.
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I’m loving having an IDE that runs dialyzer in the background and provides me with near real-time error listings. THAT makes it painless to start using @spec!
(VSCode…, but there are plugins for other editors that do it as well…)
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Each of us needs to assess how best to spend our time in order to maximize our results, both in quantity and quality. If people think that spending fifty percent of their time writing tests maximizes their results—okay for them. I’m sure that’s not true for me—I’d rather spend that time thinking about my problem. I’m certain that, for me, this produces better solutions, with fewer defects, than any other use of my time. A bad design with a complete test suite is still a bad design.
Notice that Rich Hickey seems to be speaking as if he’s working solo.
When working solo or with a very small team, perhaps an extensive suite of tests is less crucial than when you’re working on a very large codebase with several teams and many programmers, where no individual knows more than a relatively small part of the codebase.
Having tests might also be useful when you’re working on a project where the programmer turnover is high, where the tests can function as a sort of documentation safety new for new programmers.
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Hickey is saying this in the context of TDD, see http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-quarterly/2011/rich-hickey/
I have seen articles defending TDD with numbers resulting from scientific research. Here’s another paper:
http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~csstmms/FucciEtAl_ESEM2016.pdf
This painstaking study is the latest in a long line to find that test-driven development (TDD)
has little or no impact on development time or code quality. Here, the authors repeated an
earlier study with a couple of new wrinkles, and then blinded their data before giving it to
someone else to analyze to remove any possibility of bias. The result: no significant difference
between TDD and iterative test-last (ITL) development.
If you have to blind the data, the signal is weak. Also, a study on 21 grad students does not (should not) really translate to our daily practice (frankly, the longer people stick around universities, the worse their coding skills - I prefer my juniors straight out of high school ;-)).
Bashing TDD/BDD is of course like carpenters bashing a skilsaw. Because it won’t make rabbets or something like that (not that it can’t. You shouldn’t). It’s a tool, not a religion. Skilled craftsmen know when to use the tool and when to avoid it. That is the hard part of software development, and things like “100% test coverage”, “always program in pairs”, “scrum”, etcetera, are either training wheels or hugely situational.
I’ll write code test-first, test-last, no testing at all (especially in “clean” languages like Elixir, I often look at code and conclude it’s “obviously correct” - which I know is a risky proposition ;-)) and I encourage the teams I work with to do the same.Test-first usually happens when the design isn’t clear and I use “London-style” methods to drive the design. Sometimes nothing is clear and I start writing the documentation.
The major take-away is: it all depends. But if you lack the skills to make the decisions and you don’t have anyone to guide you around, I would say that “TDD and try to obtain a very high test coverage” is a very good way to keep you from shooting your feet off. At a cost, of course - see it as an insurance premium, it’s higher for beginner drivers for a reason.
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That should be proved scientifically, hahaha. Not by high school students please.
Allas, there are many religious followers. And gurus / televangelists (the gurus moralizing the masses on expensive conferences and lateron f.e. youtube) taking profit. Personal hygiene means freeing oneself of religious opinions or at least acknowledging an opinion is what it is (an opinion, not a truth).
A strawman?
Read other research papers where a positive effect is “found”. I think a relevant research question is hard to formulate (what is quality code?) + positive or negative effects of tdd hard to quantify. That should be written about in a research paper.
Discussion on HN: An External Replication on the Effects of Test-driven Development [pdf] | Hacker News
I like f.e. this comment:
The studies I’ve read all end up showing that principled testing helps,
but test-first and TDD (strict red/green cycle, code only enough to pass
the new test, etc) provide no additional benefit over anything else that
gets the tests written.The “it depends” always comes from the echo chamber trying to justify
their desire to believe that TDD isn’t completely useless. It actually feels
quite similar to the claims I’ve seen from practitioners that reikei, faith healing,
etc aren’t complete bunk.
And what about testing on production ? This days some system are so complicated that that there is only way to test them on production, like using canary deployment and metrics …
In my opinion more useful than tests are looking into metrics. Deploy new build, compare metrics with old build…
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The problem I have with research papers that try to cross psychology/sociology with computer science - the sort of paper that takes a bunch of people and assigns them work and then studies their behaviour and outcomes - invariably fall way short of “real life” and I don’t think that you can extrapolate from artificial coding tasks to the complexity of having 50+ engineers hacking away at a dozen code bases for years. If there’s one truism in our field, it is that our activity is highly social and the rules of complexity science reign supreme - the outcome is highly non-linear.
I’m waiting for a smart professor to talk someone into coughing up the requisite millions in funding to have two companies develop the same thing, one with TDD, one without. I’m sure that the paper will have “more research is needed” somewhere in there.
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That would absolutely never work as research, though. I don’t see how people think this is something you can realiably research. There are too many variables and you’ll always end up with tons of reasons that could be the real reason you ended up with your result.
Having two companies implement something with or without X/Y isn’t going to prove anything about the merits of X/Y, it’ll simply prove that for that specific task company A/B was better. It’d be a massive waste of some country’s tax money were something like this to be funded and akin to selling snake oil for whichever researcher was trying to convince the private sector about it as well.
Edit:
To put another spin on it: Why does it matter so much and why do people need these obviously never sufficient studies to validate their experience? I have things that I think are so obviously better than the alternative and I think using them makes that obvious enough to anyone with even a minimal amount of experience and ability to reason… But none of that is provable in a realistic way. It could be observable in teams and during projects, but to you’ll never get meaningful results like that.
I would never trust a study on any of these kinds of things, regardless if they agree with my point of view or not. If people are looking for ways to convince other people they should probably look elsewhere, because if someone is convinced by something that doesn’t even hold up to basic scrutiny maybe their agreement isn’t worth much.
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What I got from the original statement is that design is paramount. I have been programming for 34 years and agree. I am also in the write tests after camp.
To be honest, I also don’t give a fig about design patterns. Thinking in design patterns, starting development with tests, and even designing with a specific language in mind all affect the design negatively, in my opinion. Come up with the best design you can to solve your problem, then choose the tool or tools best suited to implement your design. Never let the tail wag the dog.
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We have replaced fact-based data-backed attitude with a faith-based
wishy-washy peace-hug-freedom hippie agile way, forcing us mechanically
to follow some steps and believe that it will be good for us. Agile has taken
us a long way from where we started at the turn of the century, but there are
problems. From personal experience, I see no difference in the quality of
developers who do TDD and do not. And to be frank, I actually see negative
effect, people who do TDD do not fully think hard about the consequence of
the code they write - I know this could be inflammatory but hand on heart, that
is my experience. I think TDD and agile has given us a safety net that as a
tightrope walker, instead of focusing on our walking technique, we improve the
safety net. As long as we do the motions, we are safe. Unit tests, coverage,
planning poker, retrospective, definition of done, Story, task, creating tickets,
moving tickets. How many bad programmers have you seen that are masters of agile?
There are developers who name themselves “software craftsmen”, especially among those specialized in ruby / elixir. That has historical reasons explained elsewhere. Not that it is the main reason for starting this thread ;-), but I have even been rejected for a job by such a proud
craftsman because of that horrible thinking for myself.
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Indeed. I was very firmly planting my tongue in my cheek when I was writing this. Should have added an appropriate emoji
As a guy who titles himself like that, I see no relation between the title and the behaviour you describe. There are douchebags with all sorts of titles and in all areas of life. 
People rejecting other people for reasons not related to the job at hand is sadly happening way too often. And escape hatch terms like “cultural fit” are now used way too often, to the point of abuse. There is such a thing as good or poor cultural fits but most of the time people are just fine working together, provided they follow a basic set of professional courtesy codex.
