[DanielBMarkham]

This sounds a bit like "we don't need no stinking testing", but I know the author is trying to hit at a deeper point. I only wish he had done better.

One of the problems here is language: TDD as a general concept can cover everything from high-level behavioral testing to a method-by-method way to design your program. There's a big difference between those two!

In general, of course, programming is balancing what the program is supposed to do with how the program is constructed. That's true whether you have TDD in the mix or not.

[anthonyb]

Good luck doing TDD with behavioral tests. Running (eg.) Selenium tests repeatedly is only going to slow you down.

[xtracto]

Tell me about it! I am in a project right now where we are required to run BDD tests (Cucumber) which hit real servers (no, mocks won't do it). Worse thing is, the 3rd party "ESB" we are using takes forever to shutdown and startup... and is being restarted a lot in the tests (someone else is doing the BDD tests as an "acceptance criteria").

The result? running the complete BDD test suite takes about 5 hours, which must be checked for every commit.

[Kequc]

This doesn't sound very brain or productivity healthy.