One analogy that has come to mind for me is TDD is like eating a whole food diet with a ton of vegetables and no processed foods. When you're doing it, you fee

One analogy that has come to mind for me is TDD is like eating a whole food diet with a ton of vegetables and no processed foods. When you're doing it, you feel great, or at least you convince yourself that you feel great because you know you're supposed to. But ultimately it's hard to keep it up. It gets tedious, it requires a lot of willpower, and the benefits are a little too abstract or far removed. At the end of the day, most people will be just as healthy with a more moderate approach. Just eat some vegetables, not too much sugar, and keep a reasonable limit on total calories. In the programming analogy - just write some tests for important functionality, and be careful that the tests you write are actually working, but you don't need to be fanatical about writing the tests before the functionality or having 100% coverage. And then as with diet, it's also possible that if you're aiming for the moderate approach you end up slipping too much to the other extreme and writing almost no tests. For some people a structured diet is necessary to keep them on track, and I suspect for some people TDD can be a more effective tool than it is for others if their default coding style tends toward more sloppy/unstructured.