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There's a distinction between TDD and writing tests. I personally find TDD paradoxical in that it's often used as a way to gather your thoughts, yet the more e

There's a distinction between TDD and writing tests. I personally find TDD paradoxical in that it's often used as a way to gather your thoughts, yet the more exploratory the work the more TDD hurts. Tests are very very useful when wrapped around the core logic and data structures of your application. But that doesn't mean they need to come first.

geebee 6y ago
"But that doesn't mean they need to come first." Curious - did you hold this opinion around 5-10 years ago, and did you voice it to any TDD advocates at the time? My experience was that a statement like this (which I consider immensely reasonable) could kick off really severe arguments, and could get you no-hired in interviews. There may have been a bit of a Motte-and-Bailey argument going on, where TDD advocates would retreat to the value of tests when defending TDD, and then go back to insisting on TDD once the coast was clear.
- RandoHolmes 6y ago
  There have been several phone screens in my life in which as soon as we started speaking about TDD and/or agile, they completely lost interest. But as far as I'm concerned that's a good thing. I write tests where it makes sense, and I can think of 1 project where I eventually regretted the decision not to write tests (before or after), but even then it didn't really hurt it just would have been a lot less scary with a good suite of tests around some specific functionality (related to pulling emails, doing the wrong thing there could mean permanently losing emails without processing).