Comments by "Mentat" (@_Mentat) on "Testing Is Bad For Developer Productivity" video.

  1. Remember, tests have zero value until they discover a bug. Even when a test discovers a bug, the cost of the bug may be small, and the cost of writing the test still a net negative. I know people who are mad for tests - they have wasted the company a lot of money. I have written hundreds of tests and whenever they failed it was always a problem with the test, not the program logic. I do actually test my software though! I prefer a battery of tests from a test harness prior to release rather than coding in tests. That way you run the tests once near release, not every time you do a build.
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  2. Don't bother, it doesn't work in the real world.
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  3.  @leesoftwareengineer  It's 2 to 3 releases a year.
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  4. @luke5100 I am working on a really terrible legacy code base; a mixture of Assembler, C, C++, C#, Java and JS dating back to the 1980s in parts ;) As a developer I do endorse paranoia though. If there's a risk someone might put bugs in your code then you need to protect yourself. However, I'm also on a tight budget and code written needs to come back as £s in the bank or I don't get paid. The airy fairy nonsense starts when people have too much money!
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  5. I have tried TDD. There is a fundamental flaw in its philosophy. The user only decides what they really want when they see the software running, i.e., you have to write the code first, then demo it, then test it. TDD violates Agile.
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