In the “TDD is dead” discussion unit testing and mocking is being mentioned frequently. DHH explicitly expressed how much he dislikes mocks and it seems like many people still connect unit testing with mocking or even confuse the two. In case you missed it Martin Fowler wrote a great article about what should be considered as a unit test. If you’re also confused about mocks and stubs I encourage you to read Mocks Arent’ Stubs....
Today DHH published a blog post about TDD being dead (to him at least). It’s really not that surprising since from what I know (please correct me if I’m wrong) David’s experience is mostly based on building web apps with Rails. I get that, I really do. For me practicing TDD in a rails environment is much harder than when I work on my OSS libraries. There are many reasons why TDD in Rails is just a bit harder than it could be but that’s a big, separate subject....
I don’t have exact numbers but I believe TDD isn’t really popular amongst rails developers. This shouldn’t be a surprise given that the two of the most complex elements in the rails stack, models and controllers, are very convoluted concepts and are simply hard to test. When you’re building a typical rails application most of the business logic lives in the active record models and controllers. Testing controllers in rails is a bit cumbersome but I still encourage people to write tests for them....