Why I think test driven development suck
Well I figured a provocative title like that would catch your attention, so please read on to find out I am not as stupid as you might think.
Unit tests are great, they reduce unknown bugs and arguably lead to better object design. The reasons for this are simple; Well thought out unit tests will force you to think about the input and output of any method your objects may have, forcing you to correctly decomposition the needed functionality within your object, because methods that have too much responsibility are a pain in the ass to write unit tests for. Simple one task methods however are easy to write unit tests for. Because your writing unit tests you are (hopefully) actively thinking about what can go wrong so that methods can actually fail.
So taking for granted that the above is true, why does test driven development suck?
Well the answer to that is a market one and really only applies to professional business. When a client comes to your business and asks for a offer for his project, you will quote him X, where X is roughly the amount of hours it takes to create the unit tests and then fill in the code + other stuff.
A development house that doesn’t use test driven development will quote that same client only for the time it takes to write the code + other stuff. We all know that after that he will spend a few weeks/months bugfixing, but that’s not what he quotes or tells the client.
Naturally the client will more often then not choose your competitor, unless you can positively convince him that the extra hours you spend will actually save him money in the long run. Which from the clients standpoint is a bit of an unproven claim if he is not technically inclined. So from a business standpoint, test driven development sucks as a selling tool.
Secondly, while this heavily depends on the morality of your business, those bugfix hours can be profitable. Depending on how smooth your talk is, you could very well be billing the client for those hours.
Thirdly, test driven development often suffers when deadlines need to be met. We all know that estimated hours is an imperfect science and often goes wrong, be it overconfident developers or overselling sales people, deadlines tend to be missed in our industry. So when deadlines are creeping, unit tests are often one of the first things to be dropped off schedule. Yes, we all know that shouldn’t happen, but it does. Once this has happened and no extra time is allocated to bring the tests up-to-date again (good luck getting that approved), the test driven development has failed and you’re just plainly developing again.
So for these reasons I think test driven development sucks. I might sometimes use it for private projects or open-source projects (for which I think it is absolutely brilliant), but certainly not for business ones. With the possible exception of in-house developed products, but I haven’t had much experience with that.
For anyone who now still thinks TDD is a sound development methodology, I would be very interested to hear you thoughts.