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Discussion on: The TDD debate: What a false dichotomy!

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Ka Wai Cheung

To be fair, I've never given TDD a full swing. It just feels so foreign to the way I view code and it certainly doesn't fit my brain when I'm building something new. It's like putting the scaffolding around something whose shape you can't foresee just yet. There's a place for tests for me. Just not at or near the beginning.

The problem is, I think in our current atmosphere, saying you don't TDD is often misinterpreted as saying you don't test. I tend to test in other ways. I write integration tests at the end of a dev cycle, but I spend most of my coding time working on things like naming and strictness -- neither of which are tests but I'd argue help prevent future bugs better than tests.

I'd rather inherit a codebase that is articulated beautifully with zero tests than one with "100% test coverage" but otherwise lacking in elegance.