Object Mentor Blog: Excuse me sir, What Planet is this?

Excuse me sir, What Planet is this?

Uncle Bob — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:35:00 -0600

Update 12 hours later.

I’m not very proud of this blog (or as one commenter correctly called it “blart”). It is derisive, sneering, and petulant. It is unprofessional. I guess I was having a bad morning. I slipped. I didn’t check with my green band.

So I apologize to the audience at large, and to Cashto. You should expect better from me.

I thought about pulling the blog down; but I think I’ll leave it up here as an example of how not to write a blog.

Some folks on twitter have been asking me to respond to this blough (don’t bother to read it right now, I’ll give you the capsule summary below. Read it later if you must). It’s a typical screed complete with all the usual complaints, pejoratives, and illogic. Generally I don’t respond to blarts like this because I don’t imagine that any readers take them very seriously. But it appears that this blelch has made the twitter rounds and that I’m going to have to say something.

Here are the writer’s main points:

He likens unit tests to training wheels and says you can’t use them to win the Tour de France.
- I think winning the Tour de France has much more to do with self-discipline than he imagines it does. I mean it’s not really just as simple as: “Get on a bike and ride like hell!”

He says testing is popular amongst college students
- I’d like to see his data!

He goes on to say: (cue John Cleese): “(ahem) unit tests lose their effectiveness around level four of the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition”.
- (blank stunned stare). Is this a joke? All false erudition aside, WTF is he talking about?

He says that unit tests don’t give us confidence in refactoring because they over-specify behavior and are too fine-grained.
- He apparently prefers hyphenations to green bars.

He says they mostly follow the “happy path” and therefore don’t find bugs.
- Maybe when he writes them! This is a big clue that the author can’t spell TDD.

He complains about Jester
- without getting the joke!

He says unit tests “encourage some pretty questionable practices.” He flings a few design principles around and says that unit testing doesn’t help with them.
- as the author, editor, and/or advocate of many of those principles; I have a slightly different view.

He says that “many are starting to discover that functional programming teaches far better design principles than unit testing ever will”
- Oh no! Not the old “My language teaches design.” claim. We’ve heard it all before. They said it about C++, Java, COM (?!), etc… The lesson of the ‘90s? Languages don’t teach design. You can make a mess in any language.

He says: “tests can have negative ROI. Not only do they cost a lot to write, they’re fragile, they’re always broken, they get in the way of your refactoring, they’re always having you chase down bogus failures, and the only way to get anything done is to ignore them.”
- In one of my favorite episodes of Dr. Who, Tom Baker exits the Tardis, walks up to someone on the street and says: “Excuse me sir, what planet is this?”

He says: “What I’m saying is that it’s okay if you don’t write unit tests for everything. You probably have already suspected this for a long time, but now you know. I don’t want you to feel guilty about it any more.”
- Translation: “I don’t want to feel guilty about it anymore so I’m going to try to convince you…” I sincerely doubt this author has your best interests at heart.

He says: “Debugging is easy, at least in comparison to writing all those tedious tests.”
- Refer back to the Dr. Who quote.

To quote Barack Obama: “Enough!”

Has this guy ever done TDD? I rather doubt it. Or if he did, he was so inept at it that his tests were “fragile”, “always broken”, and “in the way of refactoring”. I think he should give it another try and this time spend a bit more time on test design.

Perhaps he’s one of those guys who thought that unit tests were best written after the code. Certainly his list of complains makes a lot of sense in that light. Hint: If you want to fail at unit testing, write them last.

The bottom line is that the guy probably had a bad experience writing unit tests. He’s tired of writing them and wants to write fewer of them. He’d rather debug. He thinks he can refactor without tests (which is definitively false). He thinks he can go faster by writing fewer tests. Fine, that’s his choice. And he’s found a rationalization to support his desires. Great.

I predict that his results will not compare well with those who adopt the discipline of TDD. I predict that after a few years he’ll either change his mind, or go into management.

Oh, and to the author: Gesundheit!

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