🚀 TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong (Ian Cooper)

Why HN readers recommended it

HN repeatedly calls it the best talk on testing, and many say it changed how they approach tests, mocks and the meaning of a unit.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

DevTernity Conference

Topic

test-driven development

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

11

HN mentions in dataset

20

Recommendation years in dataset

2018–2024

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• 'Test Pyramid' considered harmful IMO. It discourages people from writing tests against the public interface of their system , and instead encourages testing against internals. This leads to a test pack that prevents refactoring, and can't be trusted to catch regression errors. This is partly …

• The best talk on this topic, IMO is Ian Cooper: "TDD, Where did it all go wrong?" [VIDEO] Couple of notes: - TDD, much like scrum, got corrupted by the "Agile Consulting Industry". Sticking to the original principles as laid out by Kent Beck results …

• > Firstly if the dependency isn't doing any io, you can test your code as a whole along with its dependency. No need to mock. This the thing. People have a tendency to overuse mocks. The point of automated testing (whether it's unit tests or …