Early summer last year I organized a workshop on TDD with functional programming with 10 attendees. Quite a few people have asked me about our results, but I had been waiting for a time with more leisure to write about it. Which, of course, never shows up. Since the follow-up workshop will take place later this month, it’s high time to at least sum up the main learnings of those three intensive days.
So here’s a few points I collected for an email I sent to one of inquirers. Take them as rough and rather subjective notes. The other participants, who are invited to comment, might not agree with parts or even any of it…
TDD with functional languages is certainly possible. A smooth experience, however, will require some tweaking and rethinking.
Areas where tweaking and rethinking of OO-focused TDD will be necessary:
With a stronger type system (think Haskell or even Idris) you can probably get rid of some tests. Which tests still provide benefit is up for discussion.
Stronger types also influence your workflow. We had examples where thinking about the types beforehand seemed more natural than coming up with a test. But sometimes it was the other way round: A clear example communicated better than a complex type.
Functional programming provides an easier path into a keep-side-effects-on-the-outside architecture. Especially with Haskell’s strict separation of pure and non-pure/IO types. And we all know that writing tests for pure functions is much easier.
That’s also the main reason why mocking and stubbing plays only a tiny role in testing functional code, mostly for testing the integration layer between pure and non-pure code.
A hexagonal architecture is basically the same as keep-side-effects-on-the-outside but much harder to follow in OOPLs.
There’s a yet unexplored balance between example-based and property-based-testing.
A first and rather raw heuristic we came up with: Use examples for specification and properties for exploration. In my own experimentation since, I’ve often started with concrete examples, which I could later turn into properties.
Strict types change the way you refactor. Changing a type to what you think it should be and changing your code until it successfully compiles again, seems to be a common pattern among haskellers.
What we did not look into at all was REPL-driven development because none of the attendees had solid practice doing it.
Most of the code we produced can be found on Github.
I’ve personally focused on integrating property-based testing into my style of TDD. Since the JVM is still the main platform I fight with for money, I started to develop and use jqwik.