Comments by "Ton Bong" (@tongobong1) on "Is Twitter’s Treatment Of Its Software Developers Fair?" video.

  1. I wouldn't underestimate Elon Musk after we can see his work at Tesla and SpaceX. I believe Elon saw that the whole working culture at Twitter is bad - lazy and the best way to change it is to fire most of them and then hire new engineers that will improve the working culture.
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  2. I don't think several thousand unit tests at Tweeter is too few at all since Amazon AWS has around 5 thousand unit tests and Hibernate around 10 thousand unit tests. Americans are mostly writing classical unit tests so they rarely mock out other classes or use mocking frameworks. 60 thousand tests are way too many for smaller project than Twitter and this might be the result of London style of writing unit tests. London style tests are bad for projects.
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  3. ​ @ContinuousDelivery  few years ago I worked for a company that is one of the top 10 largest financial companies in Europe on its main project with huge code base. The company has revenue of more than 100 billion per year and the project was the key for successful competition in the financial market. Unfortunately the project had mostly London style unit tests and they were a mess. Most developers were confused by them and didn't like to write them. The core of the code base was old, full of hacks and dirty. Nobody was brave enough to touch it also because it was protected by London style unit tests that knew way too much about implementation so any refactoring would mean also repairing hard to read and understand unit tests. It was easier to create a hack than to change the core. Since developers didn't like to write unit tests they kept too much of business logic in GUI classes instead of extract it into business classes because GUI classes were not required to have unit tests. We also didn't read unit tests to understand classes under tests because it was so hard to understand them. The only exception was a programmer who was regarded there as guru and he once told me that I should also mock all classes from java standard library. Then I started to think that the whole London style is just madness. Since then I studied open source github projects from top American companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Red Hat and I found that none of them are using London style tests. Their tests are straightforward classical unit tests with very few mocks - maybe 1% of tests contain mocks. It is time to stop the London style madness! I know you are British and maybe you like those tests because of the name "London" but honestly you shouldn't mix patriotism with engineering. You should critically reevaluate unit testing and I hope you can come out with the right conclusion about unit tests. Also "Tell don't ask" principle is not that great according to Martin Fowler. Good unit tests are very useful to protect the code from regression and as documentation in code so I hope influencers like yourself will save European projects from lousy London style unit tests that are more harmful to projects than useful.
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  4.  @ContinuousDelivery  London style unit tests are actually class tests because everything outside the class is mocked out. Yes they were written after the fact. TDD is not London style. You can write classical or London style unit test when using TDD. The only good thing about TDD using London style tests is the ability to implement classes top down but cost to do it are terrible London style unit tests and bad design that is just silly with chains of objects. We can get far better design with classical TDD like Kent Beck described in his book. We also get far simpler unit tests without mocks and we need less unit tests to cover the production code. The only drawback is that it is harder to implement it top down. Maybe you think that your code is well designed and clean but if it contains so many unit tests and if most of them contain mocks and many of them are just silly tests that check nothing useful then your opinion is clearly biased and you should rethink how much better design and tests you would get if you were using TDD with classical unit tests. I hope you will recognize this and you will start promoting the right way to write unit tests in Europe and to save us from the London style nightmare. Only brave developer influencer can do it. Are you brave enough?
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  5. 60 thousand unit tests on a smaller project than Twitter? This is way too many! You should delete probably 90% of them. I guess you have so many because you are mocking out everything that is not in the class under test. London style tests are terrible so you have 60 thousand terrible tests that you should replace by maybe 6000 classical tests similar to Amazon and Google unit tests.
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