In general it seems that people who keep practicing TDD have been programming for more years than people who have not tried it, or have abandoned the practice.

In general it seems that people who keep practicing TDD have been programming for more years than people who have not tried it, or have abandoned the practice. I have yet to meet a TDD practitioner who started programming that way and has not considered any alternatives. The ideas have born out of bad - serious - experiences with existing approaches. As I said in the previous thread yesterday, TDD'ing requires months or years of practice to get really productive with, and has a fairly large set of prerequisites that one has to know in order to remain sane. It took me several years of experimenting (especially with different techniques of writing unit tests) before I found a way to be productive with TDD. I also drew the connection between testability and program architecture (decoupling etc.) fairly recently (some four years ago), and that was one of the last pieces of the puzzle that made everything work. Yes, my productivity plummeted too, but the benefits were too good, and I slowly found the techniques needed to keep up with my old self in terms of produced features. I dread to think the pieces of code that send me deep down into debugging sessions due to non-existent test coverage.