[DaniFong]

Imagine test driven development for visual art. How would one write a test for visual art, beyond viewing and comprehending the partially completed work? If one could write a test in advance, one would have made a significant advance: distilled to a verbal form a description of what good art is.

Instead, many artists -- or software authors, or chefs, find a way to repeatedly sample and appraise their work as it develops over time.

I think this is far more important than TDD, because the truly important problems of software engineering are not in making software that can achieve simple correctness, but in making something that people want.

[mattvanhorn]

Actually, that is a great metaphor. But you should know, TDD is the way I repeatedly sample and appraise my work as I go. Multiple times per hour, in fact.

Red -> Green is the sampling and Green -> Refactor is the appraising.