I'm a fairly big fan of agile software development, but at the risk of being deemed an agile heathen, I'm beginning to doubt the benefits of test-driven development (and BDD) for a lean startup. Developer friends drinking the agile kool-aid swear by BDD. In theory, it's great--saves you time by identifying bugs at lower-levels and guarantees that everything works.
In practice though, I find myself spending a disproportianate time writing and getting test cases to pass compared to just writing good code and testing in a browser.
- For functionality that I know works, I sometimes have a difficult time writing and passing tests especially when the functionality is unique (e.g. Facebook login?).
- When we pivot or iterate, it seems we always spend a lot of time finding and deleting test cases related to old functionality (disincentive on iterating/pivoting, software is less flexible).
- Test cases (namely Rspec) are just plain slow to run (seconds staring at a screen before getting positive or negative feedback).
- There always seems to be about 3-5x as much code for a feature's respective set of tests as the actual feature (just takes a lot of damn time to write that much code).
- Most of the code in a lean startup are hypotheses that will be tested by the market, and possibly thrown out (even harder to rewrite test cases with slightly different requirements over writing from the beginning).
- Refactoring breaks a lot of test cases (mostly with renaming variables).
I do think TDD is great for client work, but for lean startups, I'm not so sure.
For a startup that is iterating very frequently and trying to reach a product-market fit, I find TDD to be harmful and actually impede agility. Speed trumps reliability here.
Like security (budget vs security) are speed and reliability 2 points of a continuum? Where is your slider as a lean startup?
In practice though, I find myself spending a disproportianate time writing and getting test cases to pass compared to just writing good code and testing in a browser.
- For functionality that I know works, I sometimes have a difficult time writing and passing tests especially when the functionality is unique (e.g. Facebook login?).
- When we pivot or iterate, it seems we always spend a lot of time finding and deleting test cases related to old functionality (disincentive on iterating/pivoting, software is less flexible).
- Test cases (namely Rspec) are just plain slow to run (seconds staring at a screen before getting positive or negative feedback).
- There always seems to be about 3-5x as much code for a feature's respective set of tests as the actual feature (just takes a lot of damn time to write that much code).
- Most of the code in a lean startup are hypotheses that will be tested by the market, and possibly thrown out (even harder to rewrite test cases with slightly different requirements over writing from the beginning).
- Refactoring breaks a lot of test cases (mostly with renaming variables).
I do think TDD is great for client work, but for lean startups, I'm not so sure.
For a startup that is iterating very frequently and trying to reach a product-market fit, I find TDD to be harmful and actually impede agility. Speed trumps reliability here.
Like security (budget vs security) are speed and reliability 2 points of a continuum? Where is your slider as a lean startup?