in reply to Re^5: Testing IS Development
in thread Testing IS Development

The tests of which you speak here really move into the realm of process data integrity, not the specific testing of any particular application.
That maybe for the specific example I gave*, but remember, I only raised the issue after the following statement was made:
The benefit of test driven development is, you *know* your code will work before you ship it.
which IMO, is so far away from the truth, I wouldn't hire a programmer who thinks that way. I rather have a programmer who's unsure, than one who's convinced to be right, when he isn't.

*A programmer might also assume the area of a circle is 22/7 times the radius, and write his/her tests accordingly.

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Re^7: Testing IS Development
by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Mar 12, 2009 at 01:59 UTC

    I respectfully dissent. CPAN, for instance, wouldn't be CPAN without “all those tests.” After all, we don't need to be dealing with somebody else's bugs:   we have plenty enough of our own.

    Perhaps we can take the viewpoint of Thomas Edison's quote:  “I know a hundred ways to build a light bulb that don't work.” In our case, “we know a hundred ways and places that the code doesn't fail.” This does not, of course, mean that the software is defect-free, because obviously we know that it does have plenty of defects lurking in there somewhere. So the tests that we do have, give us a good foundation for helping to consider where the defects are much less likely to be.

    I would also offer the opinion that this becomes a lot more important when you have a large number of developers working on the same project:   there is no longer a single person who “lives, breathes, and sleeps-with this piece of code every day,” who therefore has a gut-instinct about it. More than just a few people now need to have a basis for determining that the code is (and remains) reliable. When a bug happens, all of them have to dig for it, and having some objective sense of where not to start digging (first) is very helpful.

      I don't say that it's “bug free.” (Absurd...) But we do have a long list of places where it probably isn't buggy... And that's worth something.

      I respectfully dissent. CPAN, for instance, wouldn't be CPAN without “all those tests.”
      Well, unless you are claiming all the code on CPAN is bugfree, you have just proven my point.
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Re^7: Testing IS Development
by andreas1234567 (Vicar) on Mar 19, 2009 at 12:58 UTC
    *A programmer might also assume the area of a circle is 22/7 times the radius, and write his/her tests accordingly.
    Yes, but (s)he will at least detect when the assumption, correct or incorrect, no longer holds. See here for a real world example where simple testing most likely would have prevented a serious bug.
    --
    No matter how great and destructive your problems may seem now, remember, you've probably only seen the tip of them. [1]
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