RE: Erroneous Assertion about TDD

We can only aspire!  :-)
On Apr 22, 2013 3:02 AM, "Donaldson, John" <[email protected]> wrote:

> **
>
>
> Charlie,
>
> Drawing a parallel to sonnets from TDD - very nice!
> But perhaps the even shorter haiku would be an even better analogy?
> (Besides, it's hard to think of myself as the Shakespeare of unit-testing
> :-))
>
> John D.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:
> [email protected]] On Behalf Of Charlie Poole
> Sent: 20 April 2013 07:41
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [TDD] Erroneous Assertion about TDD
>
> Hi All,
>
> Here's an excerpt from a newsletter I got from O'Reilly today...
>
> "For many old-school software engineers, *developing code* has always been
> *as much an art as a science*. But as the industry focuses more on
> practices such as Test-Driven Development, and Patterns become the lingua
> franca of programming, *is there any room left for real creativity in
> coding?* Or, has it become an exercise in cookie-cutter production, putting
> together components in new ways, but without any real room for individual
> style?"
>
> How can such misunderstanding can still exist? Anyway, they asked for
> opinions and I sent this:
>
> "I was a bit dismayed at your question "...as the industry focuses more on
> practices such as Test-Driven Development, and Patterns become the lingua
> franca of programming, is there any room left for real creativity in
> coding?"
>
> "I'll address the point as it applies to Test-Driven Development, since
> that's closest to my heart. I'm an advocate of TDD as well as the
> maintainer of NUnit, a unit-test framework that aims to facilitate TDD.
>
> "To put it baldly, anyone who finds that Test-Driven Development stifles
> their creativity simply isn't doing TDD as it's intended to be practiced.
> The self-imposed discipline of first discovering tests that will require
> the development of the production code we actually want to write is without
> a doubt difficult to learn. But once it is learned, it's a source of great
> creativity. Just as the strict form of the sonnet allowed Shakespeare to
> channel his creativity, the discipline of TDD demands creativity from
> developers who adopt it.
>
> "Of course, doing TDD this way doesn't just happen. First and foremost, as
> hinted in the preceding paragraph, it's a discipline that must be first
> understood and chosen by the programmer - either as an individual or as
> part of a team that decides to adopt TDD. Management-imposed TDD - like
> most management-imposed technical practices - only succeeds in taking
> responsibility away from the programmer.
>
> "Test-Driven Development is a technique discovered and advocated by
> programmers for programmers. It's a spark for creativity. When it's
> reinterpreted as a set of rules to be imposed on the programmers, it can
> easily have the opposite affect. But that's not unique to TDD. We've seen
> it before with many other techniques and will likely see it again."
>
> What do you think? Have you heard such complaints? What do you tell people
> in response?
>
> Charlie
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>  
>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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