Question

I have been reading quite a bit recently about TDD and such and I’m not quite sold on it just yet.. I make a lot of small hobby projects(just me) and I’m concerned if trying to do TDD is overkill for such a thing. Though I have seen small open source projects with like 3 developers that do TDD. (though I have seen a few one-person projects that also do TDD)

So is TDD always a good thing to do or at what threshold does it make sense to use?

Answer 1

TDD shines in small projects. It’s often much easier to adhere to TDD in a small project, and it’s a great time to practice and get the discipline required to follow TDD.

In my experience larger projects tend to be the ones that abandon TDD at some threshold. (I’m not suggesting this is a good thing).

I think larger projects tend to abandon it for a couple of reasons:

• Developer inexperience — either in general or with TDD
• Time Constraints — Larger projects are inherently more complex
  • Added complexity leads to deadline overruns and unit tests tend to get ditched first
  • This can be exacerbated by an inexperienced team