Just before the Easter holidays, I had a discussion with two senior developers from my project about TDD. These guys are experienced software engineers that have been around for some time: they have 11 and 20 years of experience in software development under their belts.
I don’t claim to be an advocate for TDD. Currently, I do not practice it (yet), but I do recognize and appreciate its importance. TDD really “forces” you to have clear understanding about the business requirements to be implemented. You cant implement what you do not understand, right? Because you have to write the test first, your code becomes more solid, less bug prune and you have better test coverage.
Sure, writing the test first its an interesting concept: You start writing a test, and you discoverer that you need a class, and possibly a function. You create the class, function and keep writing the test. Basically, you write few lines of test, and few lines of code, few more lines of test and few more lines of code etc. etc.
Ok, I think I diverted a bit, back to the topic 
The discussion took an interesting turn, and I still keep thinking about it. My question to them was – what do you think about TDD? The responses I received totally surprised me.
One of the claims supported by them, was that TDD does not serve much purpose, and a developer will end up re-factoring the unit tests eventually anyway as a result of re-factoring the concrete classes as the development goes on. So if latter is the case, my colleagues argued that there is no point writing unit tests first. Its better to finish writing concrete class, before attempting to write any unit tests.
Also, one of the developers claimed that many books and articles written on TDD discuss examples that are quite simple to implement, and in reality it is quite difficult to use TDD for complex business scenarios.
Another claim was that TDD should be used to teach junior developers the importance of unit testing, the experienced developers don’t really need to use it. The developers should follow KISS principles instead.
I respected their opinions about it, but it seemed fundamentally wrong to me that such experienced developers claim that TDD is basically overrated. The feeling that I got from them was that a lot of developers and software engineers in IT industry really got it wrong.
It got me wondering how, after more than ten years of experience in the industry, one does not appreciate one of the best software engineering practices around …
Offcourse, having said all that, I must point out that TDD is not suitable for every case. TDD can be effective only when it is clear what need to be implemented and there is a deep understanding of requirements.
