[passthefist]

To me, the value in TDD is the same as testing in general. It's not so much for initial feature development but rather later in a project or application maintenance you see the value. I view it as amortizing the complexity over the life of the project.

Sure, it might take a bit longer to ship a simple feature, but bugs also take away from feature development, and in a complex enough application small changes might result large bugs. I guess that's true about software testing in general, but I think most developers would say there's value in having tests.

Often, the tradeoff in shipping quickly is technical debt that impacts your ability to ship quickly in the long run. I think TDD can help manage that, especially if you're planning to write tests for a feature anyway.

It does depend on what you're working on, of course, but I think most companies over-estimate their need to rapidly ship features. In the grand scheme of things adding a week to a 6 week project isn't that big a deal and might even save time in the long run.

[rco8786]

> In the grand scheme of things adding a week to a 6 week project isn't that big a deal

mmm maybe once. But that's a compounding delay. If every project is delayed by ~15% for TDD then over the course of years you can fall well behind your competitors.

> complex enough application small changes might result large bugs

Totally agree - but also on really tightly TDD-tests code bases small changes can result in huge test refactorings...many times to the point of just not doing something because the time to update the tests is prohibitively expensive.

There's a balance to all of this, and (empirically) TDD seems to be on the extreme end of the balance.