
Ask HN: TDD: What are your thoughts on it? Do you use it? - highhedgehog
At my previous job, I fought hard to introduce TDD. Neither me or my team was experienced, so I thought &quot;let&#x27;s introduce TDD, because it will reduce the possibilities of deploying buggy code&quot;.<p>Unfortunatley, it did not catch that much interest in my colleagues.<p>Now, I don&#x27;t expect TDD to save us code completely, but I think that the fact that it forces you to think before doing and provides a test bed that you constantly use to make sure what you do doesn&#x27;t break what you are sure worked before is a great thing.<p>Fast forward to today. I was talking to a potential employer (start up) and he told me they don&#x27;t use TDD becase they don&#x27;t find it efficient for the team at the moment, although he mentioned he&#x27;d like to bring it in the company the future.<p>Is TDD usually a practice is bigger, more structured companies? Do you use TDD? What are your thoughts on it? Do you work in a startup or a big company?<p>Last: what is the alternative?
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eesmith
There are a huge number of comments on TDD in the HN archives if you search
for it.

My own comments include
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15004258](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15004258)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18670445#18671642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18670445#18671642)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19222743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19222743)
.

I do not find TDD useful, for reasons I explained in the above links.

I think one of the reasons TDD is effective is that it a way that developers
are able to negotiate with management about getting the needed time to do
proper development. "Proper development" includes testing - before, during,
and after - but there's a lot of push to reduce development costs, and
developers usually have worse negotiation skills and experience than managers.

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NotPaidToPost
I think that by 'efficient' he meant that they didn't test much...

