Here's what Eric Elliot (one of the famous JS developers) wrote recently on TTD:
What happens if you don’t want / like / can’t use TDD?
40% — 80% more bugs in production.
What happens if you don’t want / like / can’t have other people reviewing your code?
33 hours of extra maintenance for every hour that would have been spent on code review (note: the studies these numbers are pulled from used static types.) Basically, skipping TDD and code review is a ridiculously bad idea — even if you use static types.
It is well accepted that types make a software more robust.
Define “more robust”. If you mean fewer bugs, it may be true that’s the popular consensus, but it’s not based on any real evidence that I’m aware of. A lot of people once believed the world was flat, too.
True, that you can try to accomplish robustness through other means besides types. TDD, code review, x, y, z, etc.
Yeah, but there’s some good evidence to support those bug-reducing methods… not so with static types.
I have been doing it for a long time and it has proven itself to make my code more robust (without TDD and code reviews).
I absolutely believe that you feel like static types help you write better code. I felt that way, too! Static types provide a very effective Linus blanket. They make us feel better, but static types don’t reduce bugs by much.
View full conversation here: medium.com/@_ericelliott/40-80-more-bugs-in-produ…