Hello there and welcome to an article I've wanted to write about factories for a very long time. This article is really a love letter to the humble factory. As a pattern it could not be simpler, yet it is the most powerful and paradoxically the most underused pattern when writing tests. An ambitious statement, let's dig in and see where we get. ## What is a Factory Ok, so this seems really basic and I imagine there are a lot of rolling eyeballs right now, but let's go through the definition I'm using, just so we're all on the same page. A factory is something that creates an object in a certain state. Factories return scalar value...
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Software development is hard, and there have been many attempts to simplify the process over the years, some good, most bad. I'd like to discuss one of the bad attempts, a recurring problem I've seen in software development that myself and my friends have dubbed "Template Driven Development" (the bad TDD). Template Driven Development is the practice of reducing software development down to a series of templates that developers should follow. Developers are given a user story and a rigid schema for how their system should be structured, they are to use a set of pre-defined patterns that they must follow when modelling concepts in th...
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