Agile Rant Update

After you've read my Agile rant you may have though: "just another old-fashioned hacker who just doesn't get it...". Fair enough, I'm myself not that sure if that what I'm saying isn't just result of lack of experience with Agile? Maybe with even more exposure all my reservations would vanish?

So I'm happy to find out that there are other people thinking roughly along my lines. For example here: Agile Hokum, in DDJ reader mail. He (the reader)says exaclty what I said:

But the "TDD corrupted by writing the tests after coding" is about as extreme as the Taliban. Testing is good. Write them before, during, after, much after, etc., all have their place.

and doubts usefulness pair programming as well. The standard TDD answer of the expert goes than like that:

I agree that tests written at anytime will generally have value. However, TDD was not designed as a way of validating code — plain unit testing will do that. TDD is first and foremost a design practice. And so doing TDD by writing the tests after the code is simply a misunderstanding of what you’re actually doing.

Well, that opinon is already dealt with in my Agile rant. But taking the simplistic road I'd just say that's the way it is handled in agile projects: not as a design technique but rather as a testing one. OK, here seems to be some confusion on the term itself: it's either Test Driven Development or Design...

On the other side the author (i.e. the reader) openly admits that he's not an Agile practitioner, so that opinion doesn't give any earnest support for my criticism?.

But look what an ex Googler says here:

This is not to say that all unit testing is bad--of course not. The dispatch logic in Guice Servlet and Sitebricks benefit from rigorous, modular unit tests. If you have ever used Gmail, Blogger, Google Apps, AdWords or Google Wave (all use Guice Servlet to dispatch requests) you have seen the benefits of this rigor first-hand. But take it from me, we could have achieved the same level of confidence with a few well written unit tests and a battery of integration tests. And we'd have been in a much better position to improve the framework and add features quickly.

That strikes a chord with me, because it's exactly the way I tested my last system - a lot of integration and pre-integration tests, and a couple of unit tests for classes which couldn't be easily tested thorougly that way. Wouldn't that be allowed at your company? Because this isn't Agile?