Hacker News Reader

Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

That's one of the less obvious (to me, at least) benefits of test driven development: When you're writing out your unit test, you're forced to think about how the implementation is going to work.

View on HN

I had the opposite reaction: I wonder if tests make it easier for you to fix code without forcing you to develop a mental model of it, assuming you're working in an unfamiliar codebase. That seems like something of a hidden drawback.

That may be possible, but it isn't inevitable. I use tests to validate that my mental model is correct. When I'm doing something greenfield, you'll see my tests are full of rather stupid-looking assertions of really basic stuff, and the reason for that is that about 5% of the time, my really basic so-simple-it-couldn't-be-wrong is wrong.

If you're building something that's going to be used as a foundation by lots of other things, those 5% errors add up really fast.

It does help in some sense, but not always. I found that, if i wrote out test cases like i am preparing a test scenario document for someone in plain English it works. If i have to open vim and write test cases, i seem to the hack mode and write out the most trivial cases, causing painfully slow development. Test Document + thinking/visualization works better for me.

I've found this as well. Just blindly writing test cases doesn't work so well unless you've already understood the higher level operation of what you're trying to build, and obviously does tend to slow down development.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com