“I would love to see an empirical study proving the claims made about TDD in this article and numerous others.”
This point is so important that I think it should have been the only one you made. Tests look good on paper. And they are great intuitively. We can make great arguments for them. But last time I asked for a clear study indicating that TDD led to better results than a non-TDD development, everyone seemed to come up blank.
What it sounds like to me is religion. Doesn't mean I won't test. And it certainly doesn't mean I'll eschew testing on a team that does testing. But it still smells suspiciously like religion, and that's very worrisome to me.
TDD teaches you how to write tests at all costs. Once you know how to test in every conceivable scenario than you can discard TDD and replace it with the wisdom of what tests are useful and understand the real ROI of writing this test or that test. If you haven't forced yourself to get good at writing tests at some point then you will fail to write a valuable test simply because the cost of writing the test seemed higher than the return even though it was only because of your lack of skill in that department.
This point is so important that I think it should have been the only one you made. Tests look good on paper. And they are great intuitively. We can make great arguments for them. But last time I asked for a clear study indicating that TDD led to better results than a non-TDD development, everyone seemed to come up blank.
What it sounds like to me is religion. Doesn't mean I won't test. And it certainly doesn't mean I'll eschew testing on a team that does testing. But it still smells suspiciously like religion, and that's very worrisome to me.