TDD as path to sloth

One of the lesser-sung attributes of Test-Driven Development is that it can actually save you development effort.

In TDD, you start by creating a failing test. Then you write code to make it pass. Sometimes the test will not fail. Perhaps you're written the test incorrectly, but other times, the functionality you planned to implement is already implemented elsewhere (e.g. in the framework / library you're using). That means you can skip implementing useless code. Remember, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability.

This happened to me yesterday, when I was refactoring some Launchpad code. Turned out Zope sets the Content-length http header if you don't. It could have happened today, because Zope also encodes Unicode strings to utf-8 for you, but I was unit-testing at a different level, so I implemented, then removed, manual utf-8 encoding.