http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=497053


in reply to Re: A danger of test driven development.
in thread A danger of test driven development.

One of the signs of this overzealous application of a methodology is when the important part--ie. the code--starts to be designed around or altered to accomodate the methodology.

Actually, in this case the fact that the code is designed to accomodate the methodology is a very good thing. Because code which is the result of tests/TDD tend to have low coupling.

Normally there is only one scenario in which code is used; the application. That means there was little outside pressure to steer the design.

When doing TDD, there is an additional scenario in which the code must work; the tests. This forces the code to be useful outside of the application, in the fairly scarce environment that is the test suite. The code must be decoupled from the rest of the application, because... it's not there.

The beauty of this is that you don't have to be a brilliant designer who is attentive and clever all the time in order to produce well structured code. You just follow these small steps one by one (write test, write code until tests pass, remove duplication, goto 10) and the rest ends up being an emergent property of those steps.

Much appreciated by us bears of small brain.

/J