What is a negative side of your TDD experience? Do you find baby steps (the simplest fix to make test green) annoying and useless? Do you find no-value tests (when test has sense initially but in final implementation checks the same logic as other test) maintanence critical? etc.The questions above are about things which I am uncomfortable with during my TDD experience. So I am interested whether other developers have similar feelings and what do they think about them.Would be thankful for the links to articles describing negative sides of TDD (Google is fullfilled by positive and often fanatic articles).
TDD negative experience
tdd
Like everything that comes under the Agile banner, TDD is something that sounds good in theory, but in practice it's not so clear how good it is (and also like most Agile things, you are told that if you don't like it, you are doing it wrong).The definition of TDD is not etched in stone: guys like Kent Beck demand that a non-compiling test must be written before a single line of code and every single line of code should be written to pass a failing test. Up front design is minimal and everything is driven by the tests. It just doesn't work. I've seen a big enterprise app developed using that methodology and I hope that it is the worse code I see in my career (it won't be far off; and that was despite having some talented developers working on it). From what I've seen it results in a huge number of poorly thought out tests that mainly validate that function calls occur, that exceptions are thrown when variables are null and the mocking framework gets a thorough workout (whoop-de-whoop); your production code gets heavily coupled to these tests and the dream of constant and easy refactoring does not appear - in fact people are even less likely to fix bad code because of all the test it will break. In this kind of environment software managers would rather have bad software with passing tests and high code coverage than good software with less tests.Conversely I've heard people argue that TDD means designing the tests up front on a high level as part of the planning phase - alongside the architectural design. These tests may change during development as more information becomes available, but they have been carefully considered and offer a good guide as to what the code should actually do. To me that makes perfect sense.