[a-saleh]

I work as a QA, and what I have noticed, tests usually help on projects that are maintained long term. After a few thousands LOC, any new addition might break something in some unrelated part of the system and tests are there to catch it.

But it kinda depends on the language. I.e. if you use strongly typed thing, you can encode things into your types that then don't need to be tested as much.

Or, in languages that have repl, I often prototype most of the thing I need to do in some sort of a scratch pad, and I started few succesfull internal tools in python or nodejs with first thousand lines in repl.it, jsfiddle, or ipython/jupyter notebook. Only after I see my initial idea seems to be working, I take apart the code into libraries and conserve them by tests.

What helped me, and what might help you in this regard, is trying to find a way how to get to the part where you are able to test out the piece of code you are working on as soon as possible.

I.e. don't wait with testing your render function until you finished the key-handling. And writing the test-cases for that piecewise functionality is usually fastest way to get there. For me, firing up i.e. ipython usually is eve faster, so that is how I start :-)