I do TDD for about 6-7 years. And it is the best thing I learned in my 10 years or so programming career.

Maybe there are geniuses that make their code work since first run. If not and You spend time debugging THEN you are wasting your time. In the debugger! And how can You be certain that change You committed didn’t break anything? Manual regression testing? Debugging code that You finished weeks ago? Again? Don’t make me laugh people.

Just think for a second. There must be reason why so many people in Ruby community do TDD, why MS created ASP.NET MVC, why there are Unit testing frameworks, mocking frameworks. You think You 2, 3 person know better then thousands? You really must be geniuses.

First TDD makes the code better, doing so, makes the final product better. It forces to decoupling things, it forces to a better design because you wont be able to test a poor design.

Those arguments about wasting time writting tests sounds terrible to me. Most of the time spended in regular software development is in debugging and bug fix and you complain about some three lines tests instead hour of debugging and bug fix? Maintenance nightmare doesnt start when the product is deployed, it starts in the very early stages of development and the poor design is almost always there when people chose to save time not writtint tests before the code.

TDD is better, is faster, but is very harder than regular development.

But, of course, as OO knowledge is some of better distributed things among humans, no one need to learn more about, some people will say I tried it and it sux.

Instead of actually knowing what you are doing, you write a bunch of tests and then mindlessly assume all your code is correct when your tests pass, not knowing full well that you might’ve coded your tests wrong in the first place. What will you do then? Suggest that tests be written for the tests?

So instead of wasting time writing tests to claim that I have “80% code coverage”, how about training software engineers to actually think, code, test, and clean up after themselves. Now all we have instead is a bunch of banshees telling me how to do my job and waste my time writing tests so they can layoff the QA department.

Not only is TDD a waste of the client’s time and money, it is a waste of the developer’s time as well.

The software testing religion is silly. This idea that you should spend countless hours writing tests so you can boldly refactor all your code safe in the knowledge that you will never introduce a single bug due to your awesome tests violates every theory of computer science there is.

For one, refactoring the code often means refactoring the tests due to changes in the API or architecture. Changing the test when you change your code is equivalent to having no test at all. Read that again if you don’t understand.

Secondly, due to the halting problem, it is impossible to write tests that will find every single possible bug. If you think otherwise, then you should submit a scientific paper with your findings because you will receive the Nobel Prize and have the distinction of proving the likes of Turing and Djikstra wrong. More likely, unit tests exist solely to give you a false sense of security about your code.

Thirdly, when the project nears completion and you fix a lot of small bugs, you will often find you spend as much time maintaining the unit tests as you do the code! You just don’t have time to do that anymore. More likely, the deadline will force you to throw out all the unit tests because they aren’t adding any value and are slowing you down too much. In which case, you’d have been better off not wasting the time writing them in the first place!

And yes, unit tests can have bugs in them. Why do people assume that developers can write test code that is completely 100% bug free whilst assuming that those same develepers are incompetent enough to include the sort of bugs that unit tests will find in the main code?

It just doesn’t make sense.

In very specific circumstances, such as writing complex scientific or mathematical code, tests make sense ONLY for the purposes of regression testing. It is a complete waste of time in every other circumstance.

Good software development is efficient. Clients expect value for money, and if they knew their developers were squandering thousands of hours of their time writing things which add no value whatsoever they would probably sue.

There’s a good reason the market favours developer groups who don’t waste their time writing tests. They do the job more efficiently.