> No, I start line by line, and tend to be thorough. When I start out there is zero complexity, everything I add to it I don't add blindly, with a "rough idea"

> No, I start line by line, and tend to be thorough. When I start out there is zero complexity, everything I add to it I don't add blindly, with a "rough idea" of what it does. I know exactly what it does. I know where user input and other code ends, and my code begins, at the least, and how I normalize things that cross the threshold. TDD isn't explosively incompatible with being careful. > What's a "real" application that has good and complete tests? Cloud Foundry has 4 or 5 million lines of Golang, about a million lines or Ruby and I think half a million lines of Java. Pretty much all test-driven. It's been a while since I checked the SLOC figures. Kubernetes is of similar (now greater and definitely faster-growing) magnitude and the community has tooling to track coverage (I think the target is > 90%), though TDD is not the norm. I've personally worked on maybe two dozen systems where TDD was the ordinary practice, both in Cloud Foundry and for clients. But it's a rare practice. Just on the numbers, almost nobody practices TDD. I'm aware that this argument is a kissing cousin to No True Scotsman, but there it is.