TDD: When the thrill has gone
summary
TDD feels awful because unit tests are fast but useless and functional tests catch bugs but take ages to set up and run; the team builds a vagrant multi-VM environment (often 7–8 VMs provisioned by Puppet) and runs suites with parallel RSpec across 4 processes yet tests still take ~15 minutes. The remedy is concrete: add a walking skeleton, deliver tiny changes frequently, use concise builders/factories as one-liners, deliberately skip low-ROI tests or leave pending specs, and throw away throwaway tests after a bug is flushed out.
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