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0 pointsrquirk11y ago0 comments

Oh come on! Reality check please :)

Tests alone provide little value to anyone. At least if you had the production code you could keep it running in its current state while you added back those important tests bit by bit.

Most of the tests wouldn't be needed as good code tends to be churn-free. Finally if you wrote the code TDD style, then writing tests for even the hairy bits would be "easy" compared to rewriting the whole system.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

thirdtruck11y ago· 1 in thread

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. :) (Or, with apologies to Adam Savage, "I reject your reality check and substitute my own!")

A huge portion of my day-to-day agony at my current job stems from a lack of tests. The developers on my team (all lifelong employees, where I'm a contract hire) are terrified of making more than the absolutely necessary changes to code. I can't replace literally copy-pasted code with a shared method without push-back. To even speak of refactoring is verboten, at least in front of our internal customers. Testing small changes can take days, as it must go through QA and the customer, and surprising bugs still slip through. As someone who went through Fowler's Refactoring as bedside reading, this process and turnover rates drives me batty.

Here's the thing: We have the production code up and running, and I'm already adding tests where I can, but we constantly run into implicit requirements. Even the senior developer, who's worked on this code base for years, keeps discovering things about it. We continue to discover genuine bugs, too. The production code empirically lacks enough information to reproduce the tests.

And "good code" begs the question. In fact, it begs two questions: (a) How do you know code is "good" if it isn't tested empirically, and (b) how can code ever be churn-free when the requirements themselves keep changing?

rquirkOP11y ago

Heh, that agony description was eerily familiar, and I'd be the employee! The hard part is not being afraid to make an obviously right change, even if it means spending ages manually testing things and then continuing to follow up weeks later when the non-obvious things you didn't think of break :)

Even in the face of changing requirements I've found that there are substrates of code that do their job without (showing?) major bugs for years. They never needing fixing. That's your good code. If you had unit tests, you'd never run them anyway because you never touch that code. They are the "select()"s of this world, but specific to whatever you're writing.

Now if the whole system had to be rewritten, the old tests would be useless anyway. You mention requirements that have changed, so those tests you had would no longer apply. You'd have to write a new system and new tests ;-)

FWIW I've found that peer code review and static analysis tools give you a lot of what unit tests would anyway, without the overhead of having to write the tests and update the dead code when you rewrite the affected part of the system.

I mean... what's the point of code anyway? Is it to be "perfect"? Or is it to do a job, earn you money, and be more or less maintainable? Constantly refactoring to stay in the same place is worse than copy-pasting code, from a business owner's POV. Sometimes it is better to have 2 copy pasted methods that are deployed and the customers are happy, than trying to have 1 perfect method sat in development. If those 2 methods never need updating again, you wasted time refactoring. If you would need a third copied method later on, that's the time to refactor.

Maybe I'm being a bit devil's advocatey. Unit tests and refactoring are good tools, but they are not "free" (since you have to test the real system anyway at some point) and Uncle Bob is a bit of a snake oil salesman anyway :-P

raverbashing11y ago

> Oh come on! Reality check please :)

I agree. Typical Uncle Bob BS

With the source code you have the product. You lose nothing, maybe some information on how it works in some corner cases (which is derivable from the source code anyway)

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