Ron Jeffries gave up TDD to solve sudoku

Ron Jeffries, one of the founder of XP, and a practitioner of TDD, was taking a challenge to solve sudoku. After 5 days of attempt, he gave up.

This story is famous because at the same time, Peter Norvik, which is another prominent figure in the computing industry has solved sudoku without TDD.

This story sometimes has been interpreted as TDD being useless, but it's worth narrowing the understanding down that TDD might not help much in a problem that requires complex algorithm.

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References

The Pragmatic Programmer (pp. 217-218).

An interesting example of this happened in 2006, when Ron Jeffires, a leading figure in the agility movement, started a series of blog posts which documented his test-driven coding of a Sudoko solver.

Backlinks

• TDD is context-specific
  • There are some cases in my experience where TDD is not applicable. See others' experience: Ron Jeffries gave up TDD to solve sudoku.