Should I be doing test-driven development?

by Jason Swett,

When I see questions from beginners regarding learning testing, sometimes they seem to conflate testing with test-driven development (TDD). People will say “I have such-and-such question about TDD” but really it’s just a question about testing, nothing to do with TDD specifically.

Other people sometimes ask questions about whether TDD is “better” than writing tests after.

In this post I’ll try to clarify what’s TDD and what’s not. I’ll also explain whether I think it makes sense for testing beginners to try to practice TDD.

Testing != TDD

First of all, at the risk of stating the obvious, testing and TDD aren’t the same thing. TDD is a specific kind of testing practice where you write the tests before you write the code that makes the test pass. (If you want to go deeper into TDD, I highly recommend Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development: By Example.)

Learning vs. incorporating

Another mistake beginners sometimes make is to conflate learning testing with incorporating testing as a habitual part of their development workflow. They feel like they need to start adopting testing practices into their workflow from day one, and if they fail to do that, then they’ve failed at learning testing.

I think it’s more productive to separate the jobs of learning testing and applying testing. It’s not like skiing, where you learn it and do it at the same time. It’s more like basketball, where you practice free throws in your driveway and build some skills that way before you try to play a real game in front of an audience. You’ll get farther in the beginning if you separate the practice from the application of what you’ve learned to production tests. When you get comfortable enough, you can take off the training wheels and get all your practice from writing production tests.

TDD is beneficial but optional

TDD is super helpful in certain scenarios but it’s not something you absolutely need to learn when you’re first learning testing. I think it’s completely appropriate to first learn the fundamentals of testing in general, and then start to learn TDD once you’ve developed a decent level of comfort with testing.

I don’t always practice TDD

I’m not an advocate of practicing TDD 100% of the time in Rails, even for experienced testers. The reason is that when I’m building a new feature, I often have little idea what shape that feature will take, and the most realistic way for me to hammer it into shape is to just start building it. Once I’ve built some of the feature, then I’ll start adding tests. So, a portion of the time, I write my tests after writing my application code.

The place where I find TDD most useful is for model code. I practice TDD in my models a high percentage of the time. Once I’ve put the broad strokes of a feature in place, I’ll usually use TDD to work out the fine-grained aspects of it.

Takeaways

  • Testing and test-driven development aren’t the same thing.
  • When you’re first learning testing, it can be helpful to separate learning testing from applying testing.
  • You don’t need to learn TDD when you’re starting out.
  • I don’t always practice TDD or even advocate practicing TDD 100% of the time. I myself practice TDD maybe 60% of the time.

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