Comment by switchbak
9 months ago
Wasn’t that Ron Jeffries who failed to solve that?
I think that says more about the person at the keyboard and their lack of familiarity with the solution space than anything about TDD per-se. You still need insight and design with TDD, blind incrementalism was never a good idea.
I agree.
I have used TDD professionally in several development teams. It's useful in the right team. TDD works well when you are not too dogmatic about it. As with everything, you need people in the team that are experienced enough to know when and where. I think the same is true for any tool, coding standard, best practice or what have you. You have to know when to deviate.
I've also held entry courses at university level teaching introductory programming. I believe that TDD can be a good tool teaching programming. Students tend to sit down and write a complete program and then start debugging. TDD teaches them to write small bits at a time and test as they go.
What UB's description of how to do TDD does not suggest that there are problems that require a different level of thinking and TDD as he describes, does not account for that.