From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2008-08-16T21:01:38+09:00
Subject: Re: BDD and TDD - What are they for?

Hi --

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008, Clinton D. Judy wrote:

> BDD looks like a way to make it easy for non-programmers to do
> programming, but not having people keep several functions in mind at any
> one time. And it also does TDD? Am I close?

I wouldn't say that it makes it easy for non-programmers to program.
At its best, it can provide output and summaries that non-programmers
can easily read, understand, and amend. But the programming part of
BDD is truly programming.

This is actually at the root of why a lot of people, including me,
find it hard to bond with RSpec. In some respects, the syntax tries to
look and read like English, but it's still 100% programming and there
are serious impedance mismatches between English and Ruby. But RSpec
generates summaries that are purely in English, and that describe the
program's requirements in such a way that any stakeholder in the
project, programmer or not, can read them. I would not expect a
non-programmer to be able to read RSpec code.

You should, however, check out RSpec if you're interested in BDD. It
represents a fantastic achievement (my problems with it are at the
level of my own stylistic preferences), and has a huge following.

> But everyone continually praises TDD and BDD, which leads me to believe
> I'm missing something profound that could make me a better programmer.
> So what's the big deal?

It scales. If you're doing something small, you can run it and eyeball
the results and that's fine (and that is, in fact, a test). Like
everything else in programming, though -- calculations, data munging,
administrative tasks -- testing your code benefits from being
automated when you have to do more than a miniscule amount of it. It's
really that simple, and everything else proceeds from that.


David

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