Should you TDD when flying solo?

There is a lot of discipline that goes into TDD,though. I'm not sure I'd advise people to start TDD by themselves. Find a friend and pair for a few hours on a saturday to learn the fundamentals and then go forth and conquer.  Be constantly aware that you're probably doing something wrong and you need to re-evaluate often and find your pain and seek out guidance to help resolve it.

If testing gets hard and you have to force yourself, you're doing it wrong and you should stop and call in your friends.

@chadmyers: Suppose you don't have any friends in the industry? I *have* to go it alone - I don't know anybody local to me to help, and none of the programmers I do know are familiar with TDD either. =(

I don't have any friends in the industry either (unless you consider Jimmy Bogard, but with friends like him, who needs enemas?).

Seriously though, two guys not knowing how to do TDD but pairing and trying to work though it is better than nothing, because then you can get encouragement and someone to say "This way we're doing it sucks, let's try something else"

Where are you geographically? Do you have decent bandwidth, we could do a remote pairing session. It's not very good, but it's better than nothing.

Worse comes to worse, a phone or skype call with someone would be helpful. If you're interested, contact any of the Los Techies guys and we can try to get something set up for you.

Also, depending on where you're at, we might know some people or be able to help put a shout-out for you to help you get connected with people who can help locally.

Hence, do TDD. LOL to your last statement. Certain states of schizophrenia may help - depending on your alter egos ;)

How about "Does TDD make sense when you are the only developer in the company... who sees any value in TDD"?

I've been told I'm wasting time, going against established (and agreed failing!!) practices, "showing off the latest fad I've ripped from someone's blog", writing too much code, refactoring too much so there's too many changes in the commits, etc.  You can maybe put up with that, but then wait until you go back to find all your tests failing because they are not even maintaining the tests that are there.

Working on my own sounds like paradise compared to that...

@chad - geographically, near Charleston SC. Never done the pair programming bit, so I'm not sure how it'd work local or remote, but I'd be willing to give it a try. Bandwidth is 'ok' - VNC on low quality settings works decently for me when I'm away from the house.

@Erik (or anyone, really):

Contact me at c.h.a.d.zzzz.@.chadmyers.zzzz.com

Remove the extraneous z's and dots (sorry, it's to block spammers).

Jimmy Bogard has a post that hits the nail on the head with being a lonely programmer yet still applying

@Erik,

Try to take a look here:

ayende.com/.../Hibernating-Rhinos--Episode-1-Rhino-Mocks-101.aspx

This is a webcast by ayende which I found very useful when I started investigating TDD.

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Thanks Reshef =) I'll check it out - I can use all the help I can get! =P

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