Modern C++ Programming with Test-Driven Development

11.3 The Bad Test Death Spiral, aka the SCUMmy Cycle

Sometimes teams embark on TDD and experience some good results for a while. Then things start sliding toward oblivion, speeding up quickly and ultimately ending up with the decision to abandon TDD. What causes this “bad test death spiral,” and how do you prevent it?

The problem isn’t unique to TDD. There’s also the “bad agile death spiral” in which the short iterations of pseudo-Agile appear to produce good results for a while. A year or eighteen months in, however, the team is flabbergasted at the mess on their hands. The net result is that Agile gets abandoned and blamed for the waste.

Ben Rady and Rod Coffin described the ​ SCUMmy cycle​ in their Agile2009 conference presentation, “Continuous ...