[DougMerritt]

I had in mind that Waterfall separates architecture design from detailed design from implementation, and in the above case, the spec being precise and finished certainly means that the top level design (or architecture or whatever) is 100% finished before the TDD development begins.

Hardly a reason to downvote me.

[Jtsummers]

But TDD does not separate architecture design from detailed design from development from testing like Waterfall. It integrates them, or at least enables integrating them. It is literally not Waterfall, which is an idealized (and thus its primary flaw) process predicated on that strong separation that TDD deliberately breaks. TDD is predicated, instead, on the idea that we don't know everything up front. Otherwise we wouldn't need or want to write tests in the middle of development.

As to the downvote, I guess you thought it was me, it was not. But I don't plan to upvote you either.

[DougMerritt]

Fair enough.

For the moment I will assume that I have a misconception that led me astray, and that I should correct in the future once I double check the thinking and the definitions etc., and I'll upvote you now for leading me in a better direction.

[Izkata]

> For the moment I will assume that I have a misconception that led me astray

If I understood your posts right, it's the same misconception a few others have had in here:

In TDD, it's not write all tests, then red->green->refactor. It's write one test, red->green->refactor, then write one more test, red->green-refactor, repeat until done.