What do I lose by adopting test driven design?
List only negatives; do not list benefits written in a negative form.
31 Answers
If you want to do “real” TDD (read: test first with the red, green, refactor steps) then you also have to start using mocks/stubs, when you want to test integration points.
When you start using mocks, after a while, you will want to start using Dependency Injection (DI) and a Inversion of Control (IoC) container. To do that you need to use interfaces for everything (which have a lot of pitfalls themselves).
At the end of the day, you have to write a lot more code, than if you just do it the “plain old way”. Instead of just a customer class, you also need to write an interface, a mock class, some IoC configuration and a few tests.
And remember that the test code should also be maintained and cared for. Tests should be as readable as everything else and it takes time to write good code.
Many developers don’t quite understand how to do all these “the right way”. But because everybody tells them that TDD is the only true way to develop software, they just try the best they can.
It is much harder than one might think. Often projects done with TDD end up with a lot of code that nobody really understands. The unit tests often test the wrong thing, the wrong way. And nobody agrees how a good test should look like, not even the so called gurus.
All those tests make it a lot harder to “change” (opposite to refactoring) the behavior of your system and simple changes just becomes too hard and time consuming.
If you read the TDD literature, there are always some very good examples, but often in real life applications, you must have a user interface and a database. This is where TDD gets really hard, and most sources don’t offer good answers. And if they do, it always involves more abstractions: mock objects, programming to an interface, MVC/MVP patterns etc., which again require a lot of knowledge, and… you have to write even more code.
So be careful… if you don’t have an enthusiastic team and at least one experienced developer who knows how to write good tests and also knows a few things about good architecture, you really have to think twice before going down the TDD road.
