The questions worth asking about techniques like TDD are "What problems does it fix?" and "What problems does it introduce?"
I would expect a determined attempt at TDD to solve the "no tests" problem, because it is so utterly insistent on tests. It should also solve the "don't know how to start" problem, because it de-emphasizes planning and design in favor of just jumping in; you write the tests, and then you do the bare minimum to make them pass.
That said, I would expect a TDD-based project to have the "bad architecture" problem: messy interfaces and sort of ad-hoc separation of concerns, because it makes no time for up-front analysis and design. It's always focused on the current feature and doing whatever it takes to make it work now.
In fairness, it does include a refactoring step, which is supposed to clean up the mess after the fact. Color me skeptical. Refactoring is hard, and people tend to do it on a large scale only when they have to.
" It should also solve the "don't know how to start" problem, because it de-emphasizes planning and design in favor of just jumping in; you write the tests, and then you do the bare minimum to make them pass"
It doesn't SOLVE this problem. It only pushes it in time, making it actually worse, because you're wasting time on stupid tests instead of actively researching a solution. No amount of tests is going to help you find the right solution if you don't know what you are doing. See http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...
I think TDD deserves a bit more credit than that. Building a simple solution for part of the problem can be credited as exploring the problem space. The same can be said for extending it to address more of the problem; that's exploration too.
But I fear this incremental approach is going to produce a very baroque solution that is going to have to be rewritten completely once the bell goes "bing" and the programmer actually understand the underlying problem well enough to produce a clean solution.
I think the larger problem with TDD is that there are at least four parts to software design, and TDD bets it all on two of them. There's requirements analysis, architectural design, construction, and finally testing. TDD is really all about the construction and testing bits. It doesn't address requirements analysis at all, and it doesn't seem to want to do architectural design, it just constructs and tests with great passion. It's imbalanced.
I would expect a determined attempt at TDD to solve the "no tests" problem, because it is so utterly insistent on tests. It should also solve the "don't know how to start" problem, because it de-emphasizes planning and design in favor of just jumping in; you write the tests, and then you do the bare minimum to make them pass.
That said, I would expect a TDD-based project to have the "bad architecture" problem: messy interfaces and sort of ad-hoc separation of concerns, because it makes no time for up-front analysis and design. It's always focused on the current feature and doing whatever it takes to make it work now.
In fairness, it does include a refactoring step, which is supposed to clean up the mess after the fact. Color me skeptical. Refactoring is hard, and people tend to do it on a large scale only when they have to.