This isn't really a new thing though, is it. There is the (in)famous example of Ron Jeffries trying to solve Sudoku through TDD (and failing miserably). http://

This isn't really a new thing though, is it. There is the (in)famous example of Ron Jeffries trying to solve Sudoku through TDD (and failing miserably). http://xprogramming.com/articles/oksudoku/ http://xprogramming.com/articles/oksudoku/ Compare and contrast his impotent flailing with Peter Norvig's masterful approach. http://norvig.com/sudoku.html http://norvig.com/sudoku.html Of course for the lulz you had people like Spolsky and Martin all use it to set out their view of software engineering with essays like Duct Tape Programming and Echoes from the Stone Age. Anyway ... The conclusion from it all was that TDD works best as a design tool for interface discovery. That you get a regression suite, of sorts, is a side effect. It doesn't work as a specific optimization tool or algorithm discovery tool. Which isn't really surprising as these are two of the few remaining 'non-mechanical' aspects of programming.