[ChristianMarks]

This is probably the first reasonably sophisticated attempt to describe a test-driven design/development process I have read.

The observation that "[s]ome teachers deal with this problem by exhorting developers to refactor rigorously with an appeal to virtues like discipline and professionalism" reminds me of E. O. Wilson's remark that "Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species."

If test-driven design were the programming panacea its proponents sometimes seem to make of it, Knuth would have written about it in TAOCP. Instead Knuth advocates Literate Programming. TDD seems to attract a cult-like following, with a relatively high ratio of opinion to cited peer-reviewed literature among proponents.

TDD as this is commonly understood seems to me like the calculational approach to program design (c.f. Anne Kaldewaij, Programming: the derivation of algorithms), only without the calculation and without predicate transformers. Still it can be a useful technique.

There is no "right" way to program. This was evident from the beginning, when Turing proved the unsolvability of the halting problem. (Conventions are another matter.)