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Discussion on: Advantages(!) of Dirty Code

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Chantal Roth

Despite the sarcasm, I think there is a point to some of it :-).
I have seen teams where the TDD is so extreme that people would write tests just because one has to write tests (because otherwise the code metrics would not pass), instead of focusing on the tests that matter.

Because at the end, all these tests don't help if the most important tests are missing, plus it adds so much overhead (tests have to be maintained), that it can be counter productive. I feel that sometimes people take the rules to literally without thinking about why the rules exist and when they make sense.

I have seen code where the modularization is taken to such an extreme, with long hierarchies interfaces and so many levels of code and gazillion tiny classes with hardly any code, making the code much less readable.

In general I think people need to take any rule with a grain of salt, and break it occasionally when it makes sense, and not blindly accept them.