Right, so as the author suggests, maybe TDD's real benefit is that it makes you think and plan a bit more before jumping into coding. Therefore, we should have

Right, so as the author suggests, maybe TDD's real benefit is that it makes you think and plan a bit more before jumping into coding. Therefore, we should have MDD - miniplan-driven-development: make a mini plan for the feature being developed, not so dissimilarly from what you would do with the first pass of TDD. The difference is, once you start implementing that plan and realize the problem is much different, you don't have to go back and keep modifying your original miniplan. You just do what you would normally do. What you gain is probably a partial improvement in your development process without much cost.