Opinion: Why I hate test-driven development

[In this reprinted #altdevblogaday opinion piece, CCP's lead technical artist Rob Galanakis explains -- with a bit of sarcasm -- why he sometimes hates test-driven development.] I have no problem saying that I write good code. I place a focus on test-driven development (TDD) and thorough unit and integration testing. I document everything I write (not just function documentation -- I document classes, modules, and systems). The fact is, since I've been doing these two things somewhat religiously, the amount of time I have spent debugging code has gone down dramatically. There are just not many bugs to find in most of the code I write, they are easy to narrow down when I find them, and they rarely regress. This is a good thing, isn't it? So why do I hate TDD? Because debugging is fun. There, I said it. I love debugging. I think lots of clever people like debugging. I love someone having a problem, coming to me, looking at it together, getting up to walk around, look at the ceiling, talk to myself, stand in front of a whiteboard, draw some lines that spark some idea, try it, manually test a fix out, slouch down in my chair staring at my computer lost in thought, and repeating this until I actually find and fix the problem. Not just think I fixed it, but really sure that I fixed it because suddenly it all makes sense. At which point I spring a terrific boner for my obviously superior brain power that was able to find this problem that plagued mere mortals. So the sad fact is, since I've been doing TDD, I haven't been able to go on this ego-trip a single time in our TDD-written codebase. Sure, sometimes we get a bug in the UI, but those usually manifest easily. Oh, and I've definitely used some frameworks and API's improperly and caused bugs because of that. But those are the annoying types of debugging we all have to do, not the magical mystery tour described above. I didn't realize how much I missed debugging until it was gone. Fortunately, there's still lots of legacy code and APIs to get my fix from. [This piece was reprinted from #AltDevBlogADay, a shared blog initiative started by @mike_acton devoted to giving game developers of all disciplines a place to motivate each other to write regularly about their personal game development passions.]