Monthly Archives: September 2016

My Test Driven Damascene moment.

Super short post to update my TDD journey. If you’ve been watching my repo you might’ve noticed some sporadic commits and what’s shaping up to be a test suite that I’ll be able to use to keep the scanner working through refactors and extensions. It’s not as much as I want to have done, but the blocker now is free time, not my attitude to TDD.

I was complaining to people about how TDD was just all wrong to me, it was just creating unit tests as you went along, because the alternative was just too stupid to believe it could exist. That you write mickey mouse code to pass arbitrary tests and then rewrite it over and over as you add more tests.

I couldn’t believe that anything could be so stupid, it seemed horribly wasteful and slow that surely no one could ever work that way.

But I tried it anyway.

It sort of works. I’ve got a function which only returns a list I’m expecting, but I’ve got other functions that do actual useful stuff. It’s working, but it’s slow. I do have pretty good tests for the functions I’ve written though. My only problem now is finding the time to work on it!