Robert C. Martin’s talks were mostly targeted towards an audience that needed convincing
Whenever I get the impression a speaker has a need to convince me of his ideas I feel an urge to leave the room. I do not accept to be treated that way.
Coplien’s Why Most Unit Testing is Waste doesn’t propose to stop testing.
Coplien doesn’t propose to stop testing, neither does aadii10, neither do I. You’re providing a straw man argument.
Moreover you are talking about testing, the op specifically asked about tdd in the narrow sense (test first, red green refactor). Tdd and unit tests are not the same.
Chad Fowler’s “tests are a design smell” is based on the observation that good tests
can only exist if [..]
I do not agree with that interpretation, you do not do him justice. This is what he actually says for the record: https://youtu.be/qH_y45he4-o?t=2603 and in http://picostitch.com/blog/2014/01/trash-your-servers-and-burn-your-code-immutable-infrastructure-and-disposable-components/ he says clearly: “Tests are also a design smell. If you find yourself more time in your tests, and I don’t mean in the design of your system.”
One of his statements in the youtube link: don’t let your testsuite become an anchor. That anchor is the reason for
skipping the refactor step entirely
Here he says “do not write unit tests, they are a design smell” https://youtu.be/-UKEPd2ipEk?t=1586 . He also says he finds tdd a productive way of writing software - something that I do not buy and deem contradictive to his other utterings. Again: Tests are “a piss-poor way of trying to specify something.”. (Do we need agile software development?)
