From Problems with TDD:
If your goal is to be confident in your code, then TDD is a weak method for developing those tests of confidence. I’ve now shown a couple of TDD examples, which were done with TDD principles foremost in mind, but which failed to consider worst-case solutions. You should not be confident that your code works just because your TDD tests pass.
When I write my code, I’m not confident that it works. I’m not even confident that a refactoring works despite passing all of the unit tests. I worry about edge cases I didn’t think of, I worry about implementation flaws, I worry about worst-case scenarios.
Amen. (Emphasis is mine.) I think TDD actually makes things worse: the fake feeling of comfort that you’ve passed the tests that YOU wrote is useless to me. I want to know what people are going to do that I DIDN’T think of.
From Gregg Rapp: The Menu Magician:
On the basis of his own research and existing studies of how people read, Rapp says the most valuable real estate on a two-panel menu (one that opens like a magazine) is the upper-right-hand corner. That area, he says, should be reserved for more profitable dishes since it is the best place to catch—and retain—the reader’s gaze.
I’m fascinated with the differences between engineering an experience for users between mediums. Compare the mediums of restaurant menus and web pages… Things couldn’t be any more different. I’d hate to see what would happen to an E-Commerce website that tries to hide what the user is looking for amongst a pile of advertisements. You just can’t get away with it.
I wanted to revive this blog, but my old installation of Wordpress was simply unmaintainable – even after updating to the latest version, the install was so spam-ridden that I decided to just trash everything and start over.
