Long, long ago, in February of 2020, Joshua Kerievsky of Industrial Logic fame published a blog post entitled, “A Tale of Two TDDers.” In it, he described a production issue which he said was based on real-world experiences in a real code base. He described two team mates, David and Sally, who took very different approaches to solving the problem.
Although based on a real incident, the story in this blog post is not the actual tale; it’s a contrived version in which David and Sally separately solve the same problem two different ways. David used a test-driven approach and took several hours to refactor a bunch of related code. Sally pushed a quick fix into production and the team immediately added the missing test case(s). Of course, in real life the team solved the problem just once. But Josh wanted to set up a question for readers: “Which programmer would you prefer on your team?”
The post generated quite a bit of enthusiastic discussion. So much, and so enthusiastic, that just 6 days later Josh posted a follow-up post, “One Defect, Two Fixes” to try and clarify. He mentioned the first post had “generated a lot of interesting discussion, some of which bordered on deep misunderstanding.”
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