Book Image

Test-Driven iOS Development with Swift

By : Dr. Dominik Hauser
Book Image

Test-Driven iOS Development with Swift

By: Dr. Dominik Hauser

Overview of this book

Test-driven development (TDD) is a proven way to find software bugs early. Writing tests before your code improves the structure and maintainability of your app. Test-Driven iOS Development with Swift will help you understand the process of TDD and how it impacts your applications written in Swift. Through practical, real-world examples, you’ll start seeing how to implement TDD in context. We will begin with an overview of your TDD workflow and then deep-dive into unit testing concepts and code cycles. We will showcase the workings of functional tests, which will help you improve the user interface. Finally, you will learn about automating deployments and continuous integration to run an environment.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Test-Driven iOS Development with Swift
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Disadvantages of TDD


Just like everything else in the world, TDD has some disadvantages. The main ones are:

  • No silver bullet: Tests help to find bugs, but they can't find bugs that you introduce in the test code and in implementation code. If you haven't understood the problem you need to solve, writing tests most probably doesn't help.

  • It seems slower at the beginning: If you start TDD, you will get the feeling that you need a longer duration of time for easy implementations. You need to think about the interfaces, write the test code, and run the tests before you can finally start writing the code.

  • All the members of a team need to do it: As TDD influences the design of code, it is recommended that either all the members of a team use TDD or no one at all. In addition to this, it's sometimes difficult to justify TDD to the management because they often have the feeling that the implementation of new features takes longer if developers write code that won't end up in the product half of the time. It helps if the whole team agrees on the importance of unit tests.

  • Tests need to be maintained when requirements change: Probably, the strongest argument against TDD is that the tests have to be maintained as the code has to. Whenever requirements change, you need to change the code and tests. But you are working with TDD. This means that you need to change the tests first and then make the tests pass. So, in reality, this disadvantage is the same as before when writing code that apparently takes a long time.