[hinkley]

This is an area where suitable extracurricular activities can give more perspective on things.

In many disciplines there are activities that end up feeling like 'scaffolding', learning exercises that you don't necessarily do all the time. They make you a better practitioner the first time you do them, continue to add value for some time, and then are useful from time to time as a refresher.

I think if you've never done TDD, you're missing out. If you had to be dragged kicking and screaming into it, you're missing out (possibly have damaged yourself in the process) You don't need to make a cult out of it (and I suspect some of the resistance to it is from people who feel like they're being asked to join one), anymore than you have to religiously clean your shoes to see value from having a set of cleaning tools.

The same for pair programming. It makes you look at some classes of problem in an new way, and those lessons can stick with you even when you are working alone on a personal project.

Most of the time these days I tend to do a testing sandwich. When I'm still trying to figure out what the APIs will allow I'm free-form writing code trying to stick the concepts together. At some point I get stuck trying to juggle corner cases, and I realize that I'm grinding gears and need to write test code for a while. At this point I still get a lot of the ergonomics benefits of TDD because I'm not yet wedded to my implementation (low sunk cost) - because it doesn't work anyway.