Jorge Manrubia

March 2, 2023

Pending tests

I recently started working on a new thing at 37signals. We have a blank slate in front of us, and nothing is set in stone, which means we are moving fast. I find myself creating meaty pull requests every day. This is how every single pull request I open ends:

pending-tests.png

This is just a reflection of how, most of the time, I write tests at the end. An exception is when a test offers me the shortest feedback loop, which, in my experience, happens more frequently in infrastructure work than in product work. But even then, I don’t look for tests to help me design systems. I don’t practice TDD (Test-driven development).

I am well-versed in TDD and what it has to offer. I fully embraced the paradigm when it exploded back in the day and I stopped using it at some point, first with a sense of guilt, then with a sense of relief.

There is something I like about TDD: it encourages observing a system from the outside, as a black box that hides complexity and offers an intelligible interface. As I’ve written in the past, I think this is a key design principle you need to apply at every level of abstraction, from outside your app boundaries until the last internal method it contains. I don’t think you need TDD to do this at all, but thinking of interfaces from their consumer’s point of view is positive.

On the negative side, TDD encourages a testing style I am very wary of: building very small and fast tests by mocking slow dependencies out. In my experience, this testing approach has a bad cost/benefit: it’s both expensive and ineffective when it comes to reaching a given level of confidence. Years ago, I wrote some thoughts about my testing preferences. I can sum them up as test the real thing as much as possible.

Another danger of TDD is the companion belief that the emphasis on building blocks that can be tested independently produces well-designed systems. I can buy that a well-designed system must be – to some extent — testable, but I don’t think the opposite is true or that every single part must be testable in isolation. You can build a terrible design out of perfectly testable units with a thousand tests that executes in less than a second. Then, there is the concern of making every module testable without dependencies, which comes with a tax to pay in terms of making those injectable and indirection. I believe you can build great or terrible designs with or without TDD; I just don’t see the solid cause-effect relationship many defend here.

But more than anything, what I like the least about TDD is the lack of pragmatism you often see associated with it. It’s rarely presented as a tool to use under certain circumstances but as a design technique that should drive how you build software. This letter of introduction, combined with the ceremony TDD brings, is a magnet for dogmatism and for all the negative things that come with it.

TDD is a topic that produces strong reactions from both practitioners and detractors. I never do TDD, but I know it works well for many. As long as it doesn’t smell like dogma or is used as a weapon to attack others’ professionalism, I have no problems with it. I just see it as a tool I don’t use.

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This article was originally published in the 37signals dev blog.
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About Jorge Manrubia

A programmer who writes about software development and many other topics. I work at 37signals.

jorgemanrubia.com