[dboat]

It's very common in software development to receive incomplete requirements. My world would be a very different place if I always receive feature complete design documents (and in same cases, any documents at all). Had I insisted on any kind of TDD, it would greatly increase my workload by reducing my ability to alter the design to accommodate new feature requests and changes while internal clients test the code.

I do gather some places do things differently though. Must be nice.

[searls]

I think I'd have to offer that my experience differs. TDD is not at all big-design-up-front, even with this reductive exercise. In fact, most features start very minimally and the tree of dependencies grows over time, just like any system becomes incrementally more complex. TDD is just one tool (of many) to help manage that complexity. Both by offering some regression value (at least of the logical bits) and also by encouraging small, bite-sized units that are easy to make sense of (and therefore change or replace)