Reservoir Dogs Testing

20 July 2018

Primarily because I’m a massive contrarian, I’ve been skeptical of the cult of TDD since I got out from under it myself as a junior way back when. Now, obviously I do actually write tests, it’s just my approach varies depending on language, project and context.

Hell, in a Rails or Django code base, I’d take a TDD approach purely because I can’t reason at all about what it’s going to do without writing something first. TDD is brilliant in certain contexts.

ANYWAY. I read this amusing blog post and decided to find and replace every instance of ‘tip’ in the opening of RD to ‘test’. There are some great bits…

I don’t test because society says I gotta. I test when somebody deserves a test. When somebody really puts forth an effort, they deserve a little something extra. But this testing automatically, that shit’s for the birds. As far as I’m concerned, they’re just doin’ their job.

As an aside, while grepping through the script, I noticed that my saying:

The words “not possible” shouldn’t be in an engineer’s vocabulary.

Is ripped off from the opening scene as well. Plus, I’m a hypocrite, because I say no all the time. Then again, just because something’s possible doesn’t mean you should do it. After all:

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

I wonder sometimes if I could even communicate without movie quotes.

Reservoir Dogs Testing

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