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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

There are a number of tech fads that were unknowingly widely promoted as a panacea whose applicability is limited to particular specific circumstances.

Microservices is another.

TDD gets pushed especially hard (I think) because when it works well it works REALLY well and because it can be quite literally addictive - the red/green being like sounds on a slot machine that generate a hit of dopamine.

Thats a recipe for some passionate promotion.

In fairness to the original author, his heterodox form of TDD does widen its applicability beyond its traditional scope of complex, stateless algorithmic code with simple APIs to the more common integration code that involves databases, etc. that predominates in most commercial code bases.

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But, what tech innovation DIDN’T start as something with limited applicability? The only way to know is to discuss the benefits and tradeoffs in something approaching social science.

But humans struggle with rigor, it’s much easier to brand and market something, or to buy in to brands. So “ideas” like microservices become brands. And they’re misunderstood and misapplied because people don’t read the copious literature that discusses the tradeoffs and variations. And they don’t practice it as a discipline with someone that has mastered the technique successfully: they do it blind.

Same goes for TDD or other XP practices that are often deride as cultish. being a discipline is even harder to adopt than a design philosophy like microservices. Disciplines are about consistent behaviour. To an outsider, it’s freaky. But calling it cultish as some do is like saying Karate or another martial art is a cult. From the outside it kind of looks like it, but discipline or kata (practice of form) is known to be a success multiplier for the sustained successful application of practices.

If you don’t have a dojo or a sensei, could you teach yourself such a set of martial arts to mastery? If not, why do we expect everyone to pick up TDD after reading a book?

TDD gets pushed because it creates great, easily trackable metrics one can gesture to as evidence that a) your code is good and b) that you're doing a good job and should be paid more.

It makes developers happy because it translates the somewhat arcane nature of the work into something easily digestible by management, and is a fig leaf for shoddy work.

It makes management happy because it goes nicely on a chart that can be shown to the director/customer/shareholders, and looks good at status meetings. It also gives them something to poke at and micromanage.

It makes the customer/shareholders happy because it provides a metric that their money is being spent _doing something_.

TDD may have started as a coding best practice, but it exists and endures - and will continue to exist and endure - because it's performative, and the performance has value to every layer of a business, even though it has nothing to do with actually making the product better at this point.

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