Very interesting case study in 5 parts when a man tries to implement a sudoku puzzle but got overwhelmed by TDD and OOP and haven’t got any tangible result except “board representation” ravimohan.blogspot.ru/2007/04/learni… (first five links)
I was ready to bet he’s just a junior getting familiar with Ruby but turned out he’s Ron Jeffries, one of the founders of eXtreme Programming. Here’s what he thinks of himself 
What’s the takeout? Don’t get stuck in the design too much I guess. Whatever works, get to the meat as quick as you can, improve later if needed. Also: methodologies, TDD and OOP won’t replace thinking about the problem at hand
I guess people read TDD as “if you don’t know what to do, write test” but then you just shifted the problem to another place and you still have to know how to write test. You still need to do thinking and design and all that. TDD isn’t helping. Slows you down though
in the end you either capable of thinking clearly and deliver simple to-the-point implementation or you aren’t. Regardless of TDD. TDD won’t make you a better programmer (can make you a high-paid consultant though, I guess)
