Don’t get me wrong, I love XP and Agile, and Test-First is a better object designer than I am. Unit tests have also saved my bacon on more than one occasion. Its just that sometimes, its strangely liberating to throw caution to the wind and code like crazy without a safety net. Some of the most fun (and technically cool) things I’ve done have been hacked together in an afternoon, with no regard to anything other than the single idea that I’m trying to express. My JMock-alike fake servlet framework (have to discuss getting that open-sourced with the PTB’s) is one example. I’ve tweaked bits and pieces since, but the core took shape in a single afternoon of manic coding.

Odd.

PS. The ‘just do it’ technique only works (for me) when coding something truly engaging. Most production code isn’t on the cutting edge of cool, and thats when test-first helps me to stay focussed and catches my silly mistakes.