| I have 20 years of experience developing web apps, most of which was at startups. Some succeeded despite not doing TDD, others failed despite doing it. I don't think doing TDD alone will make or break a startup. But I will say this - when your startup requires 40 developers to maintain the "festering pile of code" instead of the 4-6 that should be required, you are wasting investor dollars. When prospective candidates for employment see your code and run away from the interview, you are wasting time & money. When your developers get burnt out dealing with that pile of crap, and your annual turnover exceeds 100% you are wasting time, money and experience. All of these things I have seen happen, personally, at companies I worked for. And skipping TDD doesn't help you go faster. The only timescale I've seen where it seems that TDD slows me down, is on the order of minutes. Even after working a couple of hours, I'm ahead of the game because my code works - I don't spend time with a debugger, and I won't have to do a week of refactoring next month just to add a new feature. |