Re: A danger of test driven development.

You are obviously doing the right thing, but need to employee a better plan.

I would guess that part of the problem is that you have enough test cases to cover the normal situations, but not enough to cover the exceptional situations.

Comment on Re: A danger of test driven development.

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Re^2: A danger of test driven development. by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Oct 03, 2005 at 17:05 UTC
I agree w/ pg. The code came quickly back to me. Remember the hairy code I changed to pass the tests? Well, it was correct after all, and I broke it. The tests turned out to be wrong. It sounds like you had missing tests. If the field testers found a bug the code tweak introduced, there was a missing test case to match whatever it was they did to uncover it. For my own part, I have found meta-tests (like for the final object state or something; more like a user would see) to uncover bugs in my code better than micro-tests (checking return values from subs/methods; more like the hacker sees).	[reply]

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Re^2: A danger of test driven development.
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Oct 03, 2005 at 17:05 UTC

I agree w/ pg.

The code came quickly back to me. Remember the hairy code I changed to pass the tests? Well, it was correct after all, and I broke it. The tests turned out to be wrong.

It sounds like you had missing tests. If the field testers found a bug the code tweak introduced, there was a missing test case to match whatever it was they did to uncover it. For my own part, I have found meta-tests (like for the final object state or something; more like a user would see) to uncover bugs in my code better than micro-tests (checking return values from subs/methods; more like the hacker sees).

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