Is TDD a Silver Bullet?

Tags

TDD

I recently designed and implemented a project prototype. I used Test-Driven Development (TDD) as well. After implemented the project prototype for a few days, I felt TDD didn’t help me too much in this project due to lack of good requirements specification.

TTD is very helpful when we have a good requirements specification. In another words, if we know what we need to test, TDD is great. However, if we don’t have any concrete requirements specification and still is in prototyping or piloting phase, TDD is not so great.

If we design the project wrong in the upstream of software development cycle, it doesn’t matter whether we use TDD or not. The use case of TDD is in the implementation phase.

Sorry, TDD is not a silver bullet, and we still have to analyze and design first.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development

http://agiledata.org/essays/tdd.html

 

REST = HTTP?

No. REST is an architecture style, and HTTP 1.1 is one of the implementations very closely following REST style. But REST is not limited to HTTP, it can be applied to other areas as well.

A little bit history here. One of my friends, Jun, worked at CERN around 90’s. He witnessed the birth of HTTP there. He said that the scientists need to share tons of information about particles, and HTTP was invented for that purpose. The scientists never imagined at that time HTTP changed the world forever, and we now call it World Wide Web.

The HTTP evolves over the years. Fielding developed the REST architectural style while worked on HTTP 1.1 of 1996–1999.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/671118/what-exactly-is-restful-programming

https://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html