On Jun 4, 2008, at 9:05 PM, Scott Taylor wrote:
There's a general idea with rspec (and one which probably isn't
present in other testing frameworks) that says that testing *should*
influence your design.
This isn't really a framework issue - it's about TDD. Remember that
BDD started off as another way of framing TDD - it's roots are still
in TDD.
As you've read before, TDD is a design practice, not a testing
practice. There is a testing benefit we get out of it, but the great
benefit of writing tests first is that you start off thinking from a
client's perspective. This and the fact that you're adding small bits
at a time, doing the simplest thing that could possibly work,
generally leads to more highly decoupled nuggets of code than back-
filling tests.
I'm sure this is one of the reasons that David considers it an "anti-
pattern" - as it does not influence your design in any way. In
fact, I developed the the stub_any_instance patch because I needed
to test legacy code (legacy because it wasn't designed well), and it
was the only way to get to the object.
I'm sure David would have specific examples, and I'd be curious to
see them.
any_instance is a global concept. Any time you're doing something
global in an executable example you're making it harder for yourself
to understand failures later.
I guess that it's a bit more harmless with stubs, so, as I said, I'm
still open to adding a patch. I'm just not going to make it myself as
it's low priority for me.
Cheers,
David
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