>This is the problem: your judgement is biased. You think it was a good idea, but in reality, you have no real idea if it was or not.
My judgement is based upon my experience trying it both ways many times over the course of decades.
>To avoid over-building, the solution is not to invent a rule that says "just don't build".
It isnt a rule that says dont build what you need now. It is a rule that says dont try to anticipate what architectures or abstractions might be needed in the future.
>Again, you cannot know if it is worse or not.
I used to think like you when I was more junior (most do), so it's not like I dont have a lot of practice thinking that YAGNI applied only sometimes.
It was hard experience that taught me that it was pretty universal.
YAGNI is simply a tacit recognition that you can't predict the future with any reasonable level of certainty. The reason it is controversial is that some devs truly believe that they can predict the future with all the self assurance of a grandma sitting in front of a one armed bandit in vegas. So, they will:
* Create generalized functions where a specific one would have done.
* Create abstractions for something that will never be needed in the end.
* Create abstractions for something that will be needed but not in the form they initially expected.
It is not about avoiding refactoring. That misses the point entirely. Refactoring cleans up code mess that exists NOW - creating abstractions for somehting that exists NOW.
This study seems to be mainly about the value of vibe coded tests and not at all about TDD.
Perhaps unsurprisingly it found that vibe coded tests suck. As a card carrying member of the "church of TDD" (I do think it is practical), this is an empirical result I certainly would agree with.
yes, there is some yak shaving necessary to make writing tests possible.
There is often a tension between delivering fast and high quality/bug free and what is necessary for medical software or financial calculations might not be necessary for games.
The question of whether to write tests at all is not really about TDD though.
snapshot test driven development again. i already wrote a similar answer in response to your other comment.
it follows the definition of TDD and it works really well (with some caveats) but again some people get hung up on what their impression of TDD is (e.g. unit tests checking to see if a car object has a steering wheel or whatever...) rather than what it actually is and what about it is that actually works.
set up a rendering profile and preconditions that generates a minimal snippet of images/video using a predefined GPU profile.
then test for either a pixel perfect reproduction of the correct behaviour or for the properties you're looking for (if it doesnt reproduce deterministically).
this is one way. i also subscribe to the view that if the type system is modified to become stricter in such a way that it can fail reliably in the presence of this type of bug that this is also good enough.
some people might argue that these arent "strictly" TDD by some definition but they set out a path to follow red green refactor and confer identical benefits so my view is who gives a duck?
I don't have enough domain expertise to know which variant of these approaches is best but I'm enough of a TDD expert to know that what you're implying isnt possible is actually something you would would probably derive a lot of value from if you did it.
The problem with gherkin is that it was a badly designed language.
The general idea of "readable specification language" was an inspired one but it failed on execution - it has gnarly syntax, no typing and bad abstractions.
This results in poor tests which are hard to maintain and diverge between being either too repetitive to be useful or too vague to be useful.
The ecosystem is big but it's built on crumbling foundations which is why when most people used it most of them got frustrated and gave up on it.
Annoyingly there's a certain amount of gaslighting around it too ("it didnt work for you coz you werent using it correctly") which is eleven different kinds of wrong.
Ive almost never worked on a project where there was the right number of QAs who were doing the right thing.
Usually there either arent any in which case bugs get missed or there are 5 very cheap ones running mindless scripts who are standing in for the devs' inability or unwillingness to write decent automated tests but dont catch the really deep level thorny stuff.
Really? The best people I worked with were never QA.
Moreover, the best QAs would almost always try to be not QA - to shift into a better respected and better paid field.
I wish it werent so (hence my username) but there is a definite class divide between devs and QA and it shows up not just in terms of the pay packets but also who gets the boot in down times and who gets listened to. This definitely affects the quality of people.
I think it's overdue an overhaul much like the sysadmin->devops transition.
I never said he was "truly independent" nor meant to imply it.
Nonetheless it looks like he was both willing and able to push back on a good deal of the AI stupidity raining down from above and then he was removed and then, well, this...
This was after seeing those ridiculous PRs where microsoft engineers patiently deconstructed AI slop PRs they were forced to deal with on the open source repos they maintained.
When he was gone a few months later and github was folded into microsoft's org chart the writing was firmly on the wall.
My judgement is based upon my experience trying it both ways many times over the course of decades.
>To avoid over-building, the solution is not to invent a rule that says "just don't build".
It isnt a rule that says dont build what you need now. It is a rule that says dont try to anticipate what architectures or abstractions might be needed in the future.
>Again, you cannot know if it is worse or not.
I used to think like you when I was more junior (most do), so it's not like I dont have a lot of practice thinking that YAGNI applied only sometimes.
It was hard experience that taught me that it was pretty universal.