[mledu]

If anything I think this article makes a great case for TDD. If your developers aren't good at design and refactoring and that is showing up in your tests, that is an indication that your design needs to be refactored to be less coupled. TDD isn't a panacea, developers have to have some level of sense and see the signs of a less than optimal design. Pain in test creation is a great way of showing that as it simulates client code.

I also don't understand people thinking that you have to write the entire test suite up front. You build your test along with your code. You start simply and build up, this way if you don't have concrete specs your tests are helping you with the design by thinking about consumption as well as implementation.