Exactly this. The "Gilded Rose" kata is a great illustration of this principle in action. I've had the pleasure, on no small number of occasions, of diving into those files with many thousands of lines, some functions in the many hundreds of lines, and trying to sort them out so that you can confidently add new functionality. As Sandi Metz illustrates on her excellent talk on the Gilded Rose, sometimes the best (only?) way out of those messes is to rewrite from scratch. If you don't have good, intentional, design-oriented tests to tell you what the intent of each part of the code is, you may well be looking at several months of effort to get back to full functionality. The only way to prevent it is writing good tests at every step. Whether TDD or ITL, get those tests in early while you know what it is you've written and why! >.<
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Exactly this. The "Gilded Rose" kata is a great illustration of this principle in action. I've had the pleasure, on no small number of occasions, of diving into those files with many thousands of lines, some functions in the many hundreds of lines, and trying to sort them out so that you can confidently add new functionality. As Sandi Metz illustrates on her excellent talk on the Gilded Rose, sometimes the best (only?) way out of those messes is to rewrite from scratch. If you don't have good, intentional, design-oriented tests to tell you what the intent of each part of the code is, you may well be looking at several months of effort to get back to full functionality. The only way to prevent it is writing good tests at every step. Whether TDD or ITL, get those tests in early while you know what it is you've written and why! >.<