Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyberias | Hacker News Reader

You state that "TDD is best" in certain scenarios but fail to provide explanation. Why do you think TDD is best in the situations you enumerated? In fact, how does "database model" talk to other code?

I'm pretty sure unit tests, automated tests and continuous integration existed 8 years ago in 2008. According to wikipedia, CI was named by Grady Booch in 1991.

View on HN

I think they were referring to back-end part of a application or complete applications that end up as a back-end piece (SQL, HTTP server, etc) of a more user facing application. This is generally where the amount of state easily manageable and well defined.

Front end testing is much harder as you have quite a bit of state you need to manage, and things like "Is this button visible to a user" are hard for a computer to answer as for a computer you need to render the entire page, then use machine vision to look for the button and verify the text is a readable size (not a cheap operation). In the front end, you can't get away with only rendering part of it, since anything could trigger a modal/overlay, or cause some z-order/clipping/scaling issue.

I think TDD is best in the situations I enumerated because writing tests for single behaviors of single functions is easy, fast, forces you to discover errors that cause your tests to trivially test, and forces you to discover bugs in your understanding of the problem.

Continuous "Deployment", I guess. The term may have existed before I realize, but it certainly wasn't in popular use before this:

http://timothyfitz.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-i...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com