[choxi]

> "Which startups died because they got buried under the weight of their own codebase?" That's a long and very depressing list. In many of those situations, some TDD might have helped.

Could you give some examples? PG doesn't include that in his list: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html, and in my personal experience I've never met a startup that failed because they had an unmanageable codebase.

[unclebobmartin]

Quite a few actually. I can name two off the top. You've probably never heard of them (why would you, they failed). Saber, and Lucid. Oh, there are certainly others. What kills them is a code base that's too tangled to manage. Estimates grow by an order of magnitude, costs skyrocket, defects mount, customers flee, investors cut their losses.

[stephenbez]

Because of a bad codebase Netscape ended up rewriting their system which took 3 years. In the meantime their browser lost market share: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html