I’ll admit, it was a fundamental flaw in my understanding. The comment section here has given me a few things to think about and I’ll likely add an editors note onto the original article.

I am not a TDD evangelist by any means, but if people would read a bit more detail about it, and use it as a set of guidelines we would be better off.

For instance, one of the things they say beyond the "red/green/refactor" is "as the tests get more specific, the code should get more generic." This is an interesting concept in itself.

Edit:

To clarify, if you are writing the least code to make it pass, and do not have the concept that the code needs to get more generic, you /will/ think the whole thing is silly.

Next up: Fighting Distraction with Pair Programming.

I'm a distracted developer, but you'll never guess the unexpected advantage I discovered of pair programming...