Dramatic title I know – this is really a post about lessons learned and trusting your TDD instincts (your TDD spidey sense!).

First of all I need to explain some history. In the distant past I was leading part of a programme for a customer with multiple teams building software iteratively in an agile manner. There were two teams building in our company - as ever we were all trying to do things to the best of our ability and knowledge. During one of the sprint reviews that were part of our development heartbeat I noted that one part of the system had been built in a, shall we say less than optimal way, with unit tests that were, er, fragile! In essence it was one big lump of code (pretty unreadable), with tests that had clearly been engineered after the fact – testing everything from the top level as large scale integration tests, very, very slowly. My TDD spidey senses were definitely tingling!

But. It was a relatively small bit of code, it worked to spec, and we weren’t exactly running perfectly to schedule. Despite knowing it was an impact to us all as the large tests were slowing down our CI - I was persuaded that we take it on as technical debt, and funnily enough the debt was never paid back!

Now returning to the not so distant past - I returned to the customer to do some consultancy work and spoke to them about the code they had inherited. Largely they had got on really well with the code base that was handed over, with one obvious exception! Any guesses? Talking to them, they had needed to make changes, attempted to but struggled, describing the code as unreadable and unmaintainable – with the tests being more hindrance than help. Apparently after spending a couple of sprints trying to re-factor, they decided they needed to rip and replace!

As if I didn’t already have enough reasons to trust my TDD spidey sense…

So perhaps a better title would have been something like “When TDD is done badly it can seriously impact the maintainability of your code base” or “Just saying you do TDD doesn’t mean your code will be any good” – no where near as dramatic though!