These tests would send a red flag if they failed, but they aren't good as TDD tests. First, they are tied to a current time's context. Maybe next year, IMDB is

These tests would send a red flag if they failed, but they aren't good as TDD tests. First, they are tied to a current time's context. Maybe next year, IMDB is no longer a good source for movie information, and it's so bad that it's on page 2. It could happen. In theory, your test cases should be consistent. Secondly, the TDD process is always to write code to pass tests. Well it's pretty easy to write code to return IMDB, but it's really hard to write test suite, that when coded against, would produce Google. That test would look like: search_on("avatar").should_return("www.imdb.com") if is_really_good_result(imdb) Once you are Google, then you should have these tests to make sure things keep working. However, I think it is really hard (in a bad way) to do TDD on hard problems.