From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2008-08-20T13:15:47+09:00
Subject: Re: BDD and TDD - What are they for?

On Monday 18 August 2008 06:46:46 paron wrote:

> "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a
> faster horse." -- attributed to Henry Ford.

That's actually a really good analogy -- but you see, Ford's leap wasn't 
abandoning what his clients wanted altogether. People obviously do want cars.

But why do they want cars? What's the benefit of cars?

It would not be very hard to write, up front, a requirement that it be able to 
transport people and some limited amount of cargo, and that it should go 
faster than a horse.

More importantly, I don't think BDD (or TDD) is about specifying this 
requirement up-front, nor do they prevent emergent phenomena.

It's more about specifying it before you code it. Which could be down to 
several minutes before you code it.

Unless you really are blindly banging around on your keyboard, to see what 
happens. Which I'll admit to doing -- but I tend to do that in irb, not in 
source code.