The Judgment Premise | #99

Today, let’s talk about microtest TDD’s Judgment Premise: “We are absolutely and permanently reliant on individual humans using their individual judgment in TDD.” The judgment premise emphasizes the human in test-driven development. There are no known non-humans practicing TDD, so it may seem a odd that we have to talk about this, and yet, we do. As software geeks, we work with the most rigid deterministic systems conceivable, and we do much of that work in abstract mental space. To say that our target systems are machine-like is to say too little, really: they’re more machine-like than any real-world machine. The uber-mechanical material of our job can lead us to seeing every aspect of the job as if it were the same as that material, a phenomenon the French call “deformation professionelle”. Put simply: working with uber-machines all day, we imagine uber-machines everywhere.

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