Summary: I got asked the question "When do I stop testing in order to get stuff done?" My answer was "I go faster doing TDD." Here's why I get more done with TDD. It forces me to think through the problem. This allows me to tackle the programming problem and solve it more quickly. I can define the behavior. I can determine the inputs and outputs and any other behavior related to the function I'm writing. I know it works when I'm done. I know when I'm done. (All the tests pass.) It provides a challenge I can focus on. I love a challenge and it gives me that sort of strong direction. If you have trouble getting things done and getting tests in, you need to practice. You need to get used to working with tests and testing frameworks. The more you do it the better you are and the more it becomes integrated into your routine. Learn your tool. The better you understand what it can and can't do, the better and quicker tests you'll write. Only test what you need to test. You don't need to cover the entire code stack. Just the limited set of code that solves your problem. Transcript Teach Me to Code Episode 54 Hey everybody and welcome back to another Teach Me to Code podcast. This is your host, Charles Max Wood and this week I’m gonna be talking about, well I wanna answer a question that somebody post to me and I kinda going to enhashing out, what I think. But before I get started I want to acknowledge our sponsor. We have New Relic. New Relic is a super application management tool. They really do a good job by providing just some great information regarding what’s going on with your application, what exceptions are being thrown, what other problems, performance problems there are. Most of what I’ve used it for is actually either tracking down exceptions or working through and optimizing areas of the application that are slow. And they are so useful for that. Even their free version is actually pretty useful in just a couple of useful information you can get out of it. It’s really good, I highly suggest you go check ‘em out. You can do that by going to the website and clicking on the link on the right or you can go to newrelic.com. and just tell them that we sent you over. That would be great. Now, I’m gonna go ahead and jump into this topic. I’m trying to get some interviews lined up. I just haven’t spent the time to talk to people. I’ve had a few people say they’re willing, I just haven’t followed it up. So, I need to follow up and get some people on here and hopefully we can line up a few interviews here for the next few weeks. I’m thinking about changing the format of this a little bit, but I haven’t finalized what I’m thinking about so that’s just something to be aware of, that things may change within the next few podcast episodes. Alright, well let’s get into this question. So, I was chatting with a friend of mine and he asked me, cause he was facing a deadline. He said, “At one point, do you just give up on writing the test and just crank the code out because you need to get it done yesterday.” And it was interesting because I thought about it for a second and I realize that, writing the code without the test, like not doing TDD for me, actually it hampers me, and it hampers me in a lot of different ways. Mainly it’s just part of my workflow now. So, it’s kind of an interruption not to have TDD around. The other thing is it provides some real benefits to me as I’m coding that I think really make it worth the payoffs. So we’re gonna talk about those. The first thing that I think TDD really gives for you is that it allows you to think through the problem. So, you can quantify the behavior of whatever you’re testing. And even just a basic input-output kind of approach. So for example you say, “If I called this method with these arguments I should get these result”. And sometimes that’s enough. But the other thing is you also are then force to think about what other effects or behavior should come out of these.
