Should I Use TDD?

Question

I\'m the only developer in my (very small) company and I\'m about to start on a medium sized ASP.NET web application for said company.

I\'m trying to figure out if

Answer 1

Thought I would summarise and comment on some of the above comments:

1. Yes TDD is about Design. It is not about testing.
2. Not sure why QA were getting involved with George’s design stage. It sounds like they were specifying automated tests. As Tim pointed out, it’s a Development Process.
3. Kevin, you said ‘skip the testing’. One more time. TDD is about Design, it is NOT about testing. OK You can skip the design, but the finished app will be buggy and unsupportable.
4. Roshan mentioned, ‘executable specification of what your component should do’. That means fully up to date documentation. When you are new to a project you can get up to speed very quickly, you can see exactly what the original Developer intended. And, as Jon mentioned you can make code changes and ensure that nothing is broken.

Answer 2

TDD is a great practice and I cant talk highly enough of it.

However, if I was in your position I would not worry so much about TDD for now and instead concentrate on having some good unit tests around your code.

You can always start using TDD a bit later on in your project, when the tricky business logic comes around.

I wouldn't want you to have a bad experience of TDD, which could happen if you are under delivery pressures and have no experience in using the practice.

It could be an idea to try out a few TDD Katas at home to become familiar with it, before using it at work.

Some good Katas can be found here

Answer 3

TDD, pseudo TDD and quasi TDD. Lots of different approaches. It just depends on who enforces the level of TDD. Lots of pros and cons too, again it depends your personnel. This is one of those double edge swords philosophies. If you don't know what you're doing or there is a separate level of understanding within your group(s), it will bog you down and lead to internal struggles, which eventually leads to removing TDD altogether. Also TDD is different from (Just writing tests).