In a presentation by Cedric Beust and Alexandru Popescu at QCon San Francisco, about "Designing for Testability", called "Next Generation Testing", and in his post, Cedric talks about "Test Driven Development" (TDD), and does not talk to promote it.

Actually, he does not talk against it, but simply questions about using it, as if it is a good idea or apply-able to all cases. Cedrics points several problems of using Test-Up-Front technique, and one of his lines is: "Promotes micro-design over macro-design". Follow me on this...

Let's change the last D from Development to Design. A Test Driven Design is that one that is accomplished by basing the decisions on the test (The principle may read: follow the option that is best testable). No one is saying when to test, nor if you create the test before or after the actual coding. We are actually thinking on design, and taking into account one -ility: the Testing one.

Now, from my post about the design levels, (and here is what drove my attention over that Cedric's line), the term "micro-design" is defined as the design decisions the developer makes during the implementation of the "tactical design". Those design decisions should be in accordance to the tactical design, and those should support the strategic design.

Here, the question is now if the Test Drive Design is driving a design level that is not the micro design! Tests, if we talk about Unit and Functional tests as I think TDD means them, are a developers level thing. They, in this case, should drive Micro-Design only, and should never drive other design levels.

Let me explain it in other words: TDD shouldn't tell you what classes to use, which artifacts (queues, files, etc) or which relations between functional units there are. But it may help you decide which call sequence to use, which functions should a class have, which structures to rely on. Those are micro-design decisions, that may later on be refactored.

TDD, used at micro-design level will help define interfaces, improve cohesion and even enforce encapsulation and information hiding (if used correctly, of course, since we can create tests that violates all those best practices). But that is when the developer is creating the operational level descriptions (code). There should be a tactical design in place before doing this. And there should be an strategic design in place before that. We can use the testability to drive some decisions at those levels, but they cannot be the main -ility at all.

William Martinez