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This seems to be the case with a lot of "methodologies" like TDD, Agile, XP, etc. as well as "XXX considered harmful"-style proscriptions.

A simple idea ("hey, I was facing a tricky problem and this new way of approaching it worked for me. Maybe it will help you too?") mutates into a blanket law ("this is the only way to solve all the problems") and then pointy-haired folks notice the trend and enshrine it into corporate policy.

But Fred Brooks was right: there are no silver bullets. Do what works best for you/your team.

yeah, I find software engineers like to find absolute answers to fuzzy problems. I guess it's the nature of the job

The 2000s design-patterns-mania is another case. Design patterns should be thought of less as things you have to memorize and apply in a textbook fashion, and more like tropes: things you'll see over and over in code, and once you know their names you can start talking about them and their interactions in meaningful ways. Just as writers like tropes because they make the job of writing easier, overuse of them is a sign of laziness; and so it is with design patterns.

The fun thing about this book (which I haven't read in it's entirety) is that it really shuts down a lot of the maximalist ideas in a few places (here's one particular section).

  There are really two questions lurking here: 
  How much ground should each test cover?
  How many intermediate stages should you go through as you refactor?
  You could write the tests so they each encouraged the addition of a single line of logic and a handful of refactorings. You could write the tests so they each encouraged the addition of hundreds of lines of logic and hours of refactoring. Which should you do?
  Part of the answer is that you should be able to do either. The tendency of Test-Driven Developers over time is clear, though - smaller steps. However, folks are experimenting with driving development from application-level tests, either alone or in conjunction with the programmer-level tests we've been writing.

Indeed. I read the book in hopes of getting a good intro to TDD after only picking it up by osmosis (which, as proven by the discussions here, is not a good way to learn TDD) and it definitely goes against the maximalist interpretation as described in TFA. While there are examples showing the minimal code-approach he is very explicit about the fact that you don't have to write your code that way.

One thing I liked specifically was his emphasis on the idea that you can use TDD to adjust the size of your steps to match the complexity of the code. Very complex? Small steps with many tests, maybe using the minimal code-approach to get things going. Simple/trivial? A single test and the solution immediately with no awkward step in between.

You have got to be kidding. Beck's book - both TDD: By Example and Extreme Programming - are very well written and have about the highest signal/noise ratio of any programming books.

_Test Driven Development: By Example_ certainly had the highest ratio of dumb unnecessary jokes to contrived unconvincing examples of any programming book I have read. My copy of TAOCP volume 3 doesn't even begin to compare. Clearly Knuth was doing something wrong.

> > This has happened to me several times while writing this book. I would get the code a bit twisted. “But I have to finish the book. The children are starving, and the bill collectors are pounding on the door.”

I wonder how much methodologies, books are written with the same banal driver. It is somebody's livelihood and they don't pay writers to stop middle of it because they realize its flawed.

I once found a book on triangular currency arbitrage or something like that at my library. It was 4000 pages long and the book was heavy. The book would ramble on in languages that made it difficult to follow and would be filled with mathmetical notations to the brim which really offered no value because the book was written in the 70s and it no longer offered any executable knowledge. But finance schools swear by it and speaking out would trigger a lot of people.

TDD is a cult. Science is also a cult in that manner, it rejects the existence of what it cannot measure and it gangs up on those that go against it.