Yeah, so you don't have a blog, yet you have opinion :). You can down-vote all you want, only thing your post shows is that you are struggling with test driven development. You should learn it well, and then you will be in position to say what part you don't think is useful.
And to be constructive, I would suggest instead of trying with unit tests, maybe go with integration testing first and just do that initially, you might enjoy it more.
"You can down-vote all you want, only thing your post shows is that you are struggling with insert development practice here development. You should learn it well, and then you will be in position to say what part you don't think is useful."
The blog post, on the other hand, is not generic. I've had similar experiences: in many cases TDD makes trivial coding issues influence overall application design (in a bad way) instead of application design driving those trivial decisions. I can even tell you when this happens. It happens when the complexity in the application comes mainly from structuring large chunks of mostly trivial functionality. I've had pretty positive TDD experience with other type of applications - ones where complexity comes mainly from some data-processing algorithms, while the overall structure of the app is fairly simple. (Think web app vs language parser.)
I would like to respond to comments to this post. It is not generic, it is how mind works. If it is hard, it starts finding excuses. Once you master it better, suddenly excuses are gone. I read the post and it doesn't sway me one bit in my view. More experienced developers usually say that they find some part of the testing more useful, while other level is more tedious and they don't feel it is as useful.
Consultants use TDD because it gives more predictable results.
There are cases when you need to do spike first to discover how to go about a problem, which doesn't say you don't test, just do that when it is appropriate. I think what you suggest as an example is that.
Also, I don't believe that you should write tests every time, sometimes if you are a startup and want to do quick and dirty prototype, I don't think it is a bad idea to skip testing, but again, this is not to say startup don't do testing, they are the one who need it more then most, just you should be flexible in your approach to coding and software development.
