I hereby declare my love affair with Test Driven Development over, and my new infatuation with Behavior Driven Development beginning. Call me a cool-aid drinker, a bandwagon jumper, or whatever you want... I finally get it...
When I write TDD / Unit Test code like this:
[Test]
public void WhenMagic8BallIsShaken_ThenAnAnswerIsGiven()
{
//insert code and asserts, here.
}
(and yes, this is an actual example of a unit test I wrote last week, during a TDD training session I was doing for some coworkers), what am I really doing? I'm not just doing TDD, I'm not just Unit Testing... I'm specifying the behavior of the system; I'm specifying the experience of using the magic 8 ball; and really, I'm only about one step away from the mechanics of Behavior Driven Development.
It's an eye-opening realization for me, and gets me all kinds of excited and re-invigorated to learn more.
Now, I'm not going to say that TDD is dead or invalid - it's more like saying I finally see how Domain Driven Design and Test Driven Development are truly married together... and then you change the semantics of the name to fit that marriage.
It's also worth noting that this jump, for me, is purely from the engineering perspective so far. I still have no real experience with a true agile development project / process. Although I'm slowly stepping closer to that - the more I see in the engineering practices, the more I see the need for the project management practices.
... more to come, as I travel down this path.