Giving Up on TDD
For many paragraphs, I thought this was a parody of TDD defense, but then it turns out it wasn&#x27;t.<p>His &#x27;defense&#x27; of the point is basically: Look, when you do TDD you have to put a lot more work into the tests than you thought! It is not just a simple thing!<p>Okay, fine, but ... Before embarking on TDD, the programmer had a picture in his head of what the costs+benefits of this change would be. Now you are telling him the costs are WAY higher. So a successful defense would have to then make the case that the benefits are also WAY higher.<p>But he doesn&#x27;t. Because the benefits aren&#x27;t higher, in fact they are lower (as is the case with every well-intended scheme in the history of anything.)<p>As usual my advice on this is: look at the people who build things you find highly impressive, and study how they did it. This is much more fruitful than reading the output of people who want to spend all day telling you how to program (which leaves very little time for them to build software that is impressive, i.e. they never even test their own ideas!)