Are "TDD Tests" different to Unit Tests?

Posted by asgeo1 on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by asgeo1
Published on 2011-06-24T02:10:08Z Indexed on 2011/06/24 8:30 UTC
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TDD

I read this article about TDD and unit testing:

http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2009/04/11/tdd-tests-are-not-unit-tests.aspx

I think it was an excellent article.

The author makes a distinction between what he calls "TDD Tests" and unit testing. They appear to be different tests to him.

Previous to reading this article I thought unit tests were a by-product of TDD. I didn't realise you might also create "TDD tests".

The author seems to imply that creating unit tests is not enough for TDD as the granularity of a unit test is too small for what we are trying to achieve with TDD. So his TDD tests might test a few classes at once.

At the end of the article there is some discussion from the author with some other people about whether there really is a distinction between "TDD Tests" and unit testing. Seems to be some contention around this idea.

The example "TDD tests" the author showed at the end of the article just looked like normal MVC unit tests to me - perhaps "TDD tests" vs unit tests is just a matter of semantics?

I would like to hear some more opinions on this, and whether there is / isn't a distinction between the two tests.

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