TDD with limited resources

Posted by bunglestink on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by bunglestink
Published on 2011-01-29T15:04:48Z Indexed on 2011/01/29 15:32 UTC
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TDD

I work in a large company, but on a just two man team developing desktop LOB applications. I have been researching TDD for quite a while now, and although it is easy to realize its benefits for larger applications, I am having a hard time trying to justify the time to begin using TDD on the scale of our applications.

I understand its advantages in automating testing, improving maintainability, etc., but on our scale, writing even basic unit tests for all of our components could easily double development time. Since we are already undermanned with extreme deadlines, I am not sure what direction to take. While other practices such as agile iterative development make perfect since, I am kind of torn over the productivity trade-offs of TDD on a small team.

Are the advantages of TDD worth the extra development time on small teams with very tight schedules?

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