I'm currently putting together training material on test-driven development for an XP course I'm pulling off in early January and have thus been reflecting on a lot of things. One thought this process created was that TDD in fact kills my courage, in a way. In a good way, I guess. Let me explain.

I'm coding something, going from red to green and back. I've just pushed CTRL-F11 in Eclipse to launch the integrated JUnit test runner when someone walks by and says something. I look up for a split second to realize that that someone wasn't talking to me. I see the green bar. What do I do? CTRL-F11. Again.

What's happening here is that I don't trust the green bar if I don't actually see the tests flashing by and the screen to update. One level down, what's happening here? Am I exhibiting a lack of trust against the IDE? Not that far fetched, but I'm not 100% certain either. What I suspect has most to do with my need to re-run the tests is that I've become so accustomed to having the safety of combining small steps and unit tests that I'm literally addicted to seeing the tests run before I continue.

What I meant by this being a good thing was, of course, the fact that being unable to continue without running the tests would seem to indicate that I've grown slightly less vulnerable to slip from a good practice.

Have you noticed something similar? What do you think about my self-diagnosis? I'd love to hear about it.