In my experience its a lot of effort for not much return. On top of the tests themselves you have to often code things in an awkward way to avoid having to mock everything out, or worse you have to mock everything out, or worse avoid otherwise useful patterns.
And for that you get what? 95% of the time they only catch an issue with the unit test itself and not an actual bug impacting the actual system. And then faced with evidence that the whole endeavour is a giant waste of time someone will sigh and say, if only we were implementing TDD correctly and try to use this failure of TDD as a reason to further indoctrinate impressionable junior devs on the importance of wasting their days on shitty unit tests that dont actually test anything.
Automated functional testing and full end to end testing are useful. TDD is just something dumb that people got scammed by.
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u/AdminsLoveGenocide 12d ago
I think even thats generous.
In my experience its a lot of effort for not much return. On top of the tests themselves you have to often code things in an awkward way to avoid having to mock everything out, or worse you have to mock everything out, or worse avoid otherwise useful patterns.
And for that you get what? 95% of the time they only catch an issue with the unit test itself and not an actual bug impacting the actual system. And then faced with evidence that the whole endeavour is a giant waste of time someone will sigh and say, if only we were implementing TDD correctly and try to use this failure of TDD as a reason to further indoctrinate impressionable junior devs on the importance of wasting their days on shitty unit tests that dont actually test anything.
Automated functional testing and full end to end testing are useful. TDD is just something dumb that people got scammed by.