Back in April, Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson caused a stir when he asserted in a RailsConf keynote that Test Driven Development (TDD) was an unrealistic and ineffective fad that had seen its day. Test-first development was a good set of training wheels for learning how to think about testing, he wrote, but in the long run, as the "test-first rhetoric got louder and angrier," Hansson had found himself pulling away. Finally, he hit his breaking point with the fundamentalist dogma of TDD:
Enough. No more. My name is David, and I do not write software test-first. I refuse to apologize for that any more, much less hide it. I'm grateful for what TDD did to open my eyes to automated regression testing, but I've long since moved on from the design dogma.
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