I can actually write entire features with appropriate test coverage from the ground up and they work first time and have close to zero defects in production.
It's amazing when you spend 5-6 days writing code that does nothing and at the last moment, everything slots together with a few integration tests and wham, feature done. Not talking trivial stuff here either; big integrations across several different providers/abstractions, bits of UI, the lot.
You see a lot of people arguing against this but I'm going to be honest, they churn out a lot of stuff that doesn't actually work.
> You see a lot of people arguing against this but I'm going to be honest, they churn out a lot of stuff that doesn't actually work.
My anecdata cancels out your anecdata. The TDD practitioners that I've met have, without exception, written code that worked fine for only the one case that they've tested. Example: They'd test a method for sending a message with the string "hello". Turns out the method didn't URL-encode the message before POST-ing it, and sending anything with a space was broken. They were confident and pushed the change.
Not saying you're wrong, just that TDD doesn't seem to work for everybody, and can even be a distraction.
That's an integration test really. The clients all have an abstraction around the http endpoints so nothing touches integration in unit tests. The advantage of this is you deal with transfer objects only in the code, no HTTP which would violate separation of concerns.
I use HttpMock myself in test cases which fires up an http server for personal projects. We use Wiremock commercially.
1) Write a test that runs the service and saves output to a file.
2) Mock out the call to just return the data from the file and validate results.
3) If you need variations on this data just modify the file/data (often as part of the test)
I usually leave number 1 in the code but disabled since it often relies on remote data that may not be stable. Having the test run more than once is not very beneficial but being able to run it later and see what exactly has changed is great.
I can actually write entire features with appropriate test coverage from the ground up and they work first time and have close to zero defects in production.
It's amazing when you spend 5-6 days writing code that does nothing and at the last moment, everything slots together with a few integration tests and wham, feature done. Not talking trivial stuff here either; big integrations across several different providers/abstractions, bits of UI, the lot.
You see a lot of people arguing against this but I'm going to be honest, they churn out a lot of stuff that doesn't actually work.