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Yes, precisely.

TDD works for experienced developers who know the problem domain well. It does NOT work for that new junior dev you hired straight out of college. They need to write functions and features first and see the spectacular ways in which those functions and features can fail (in a dev/test environment, hopefully), and then use that experience to switch over to TDD when they write a similar feature/function in their next project.



> TDD works for experienced developers who know the problem domain well

This is important: it's not only junior devs that fail -- TDD also does NOT work for experienced developers who do NOT know the problem domain well, as the infamous Sudoku solver debacle showed, where Ron Jeffries got too caught up in TDD/refactoring to make any serious progress in actually solving Sudoku.


Amen. And this is what spikes are for :)

I TDD, but I don't TDD my spikes. Sometimes I write an almost working system before I start actually working...




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