this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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I doubt that by now the concept of TDD is unheard of to any professional team. Name-dropping concepts actually contributes to loose credibility of any code quality effort, and works against you.
Also, TDD's credibility is already low as it piles on the requirement of spending unordinate amounts of extra work effort on aspects of a project which don't deliver features, and thus it's value-added is questionable from a project management perspective.
One aspect that does work is framing the need for tests as assurance that specific invariants are verified and preserved, and thus they contribute to prevent regressions and expected failure modes. From my experience it's far easier to sell the need for specific tests if they are framed as "we need assurances that this component does not fail under conceivable usecases" and specially as "we were screwed by this bug and we need to be absolutely sure we don't experience it ever again."
Agreed - this is the specific aspect which I hoped would be communicated by studying TDD a bit!
The team is afraid that making changes will be more difficult when tests exist, but TDD (or maybe a more specific concept like you mentioned) demonstrates that tests make future changes easier.
And I specifically advocated not to follow “write tests first”.
OK. If I were having an in-depth discussion with my team of fellow developers to convince them to start writing tests, I don’t think that’s name-dropping.