Chapter 10Practice 6: Write the Test First
Isn’t TDD dead?
Some people are claiming that the practice we’ll discuss next, test-driven development (TDD), is dead and gone. It was a nice idea, they say, but hasn’t worked out in practice. They speak of “test-induced damage” caused by over-testing where people write too many tests or implementation-dependent tests that end up being a burden rather than an asset.
And they’re right.
I’ve seen “test-induced damage” before—when developers don’t know when to stop writing tests.
A key benefit of the tests software developers create by doing test-first development is they support us when we have to change existing code. But when developers write too many tests, or write implementation-dependent tests, ...
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