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    Two remarks beyond Greg's observation that TDD implies a refactoring phase: (1) Robert C Martin has opinions, and many of them aren't that good. Clean code is a great marketing term, but Martin doesn't do a great job of explaining when good is good enough. By explaining concepts via teachable slogans, nuance is lost. (2) You can make a lot of aspects automatically checkable via linters and static analysis, for example variable naming schemes or a method's cyclomatic complexity. That's not a test in the TDD sense, but has equivalent developer experience. Commented Jul 27, 2024 at 13:47
  • When people talk about TDD most of the time they think about testing runtime behaviour. However it most certainly is possible to test the code design itself up to a certain level. That's what static analyzers do all the time. However to fully enforce things like clean design is simply not possible technically. Such static analysis is just too hard I think. For example: how can I write a test that checks that a class does only one thing? That's not even formally well defined. Commented Jul 27, 2024 at 16:11