Testing smackdown, part 1

It's not often you see the heavyweights go straight at each other, so when they do, it's worth taking note -- not for the spectacle, but to try to understand how they could be so far apart on something fundamental.

Robert C. Martin is deeply troubled by something Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood said. Yes, the Robert that wrote one of the greatest dev books ever. Yes, the same Joel and Jeff that inhabit spots 1 and 3 in Jurgen Appelo's top 100 software dev blogs.

Here's the offending quote, as spoken by Jeff:

I don't want to come out and say I'm against [unit] testing, because I'm really not. Anything that improves quality is good. But there's multiple axes you're working on here; quality is just one axis. And I find, sadly, to be completely honest with everybody listening, quality really doesn't matter that much, in the big scheme of things.

Here's Robert's reaction:

I was riding my exercise bike, listening to Stack Overflow #38 when I heard Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky say “Quality just doesn’t matter that much.” I nearly fell off my bike.

I mean this is Joel Spolsky right? His buddy Jeff makes this incredibly dumb statement and Joel grunts his approval. WTF?

This is the kind of idiotic statement I would expect to hear from junior hackers, or people who haven’t written very much code.

The condemnation would have been much harsher if "Uncle Bob" hadn't interpreted the offending comments generously.

Joel may be aware of the controversy, because he promptly posted on his own blog part of the transcript from the podcast, which I don't recall him ever doing before. Read it and form your own opinion about the context of Jeff's comments.

I will have my own opinion about it tomorrow after you've had a chance to consider your own.