I’ve just had a post published on the Mindera company blog, It’s Time to Stop Lying About TDD. This post came from a frustration with both companies and developers using the term TDD (Test-Driven Development) when what they really mean is that they have a code-coverage threshold. Adding coverage without using TDD removes many of the benefits of the practise. TDD is hard, and requires practise to get good at it, and few developers give it the time needed.
Many of the CVs that I see as a Java interviewer for Mindera mention test-driven development (TDD). It’s in most of the job roles I see advertised too. But I am fairly certain that most people are not actually doing TDD.
How do I know this? Because when we do live-coding exercises, very few candidates write tests, let alone do them before they add any code. It’s the same with the code samples sent in — very few of them include tests. Maybe these developers are using TDD, but they are not demonstrating it.
3 replies on “Time to stop lying about TDD”
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