Is is possible to correctly call yourself (or your team) "Agile" if you don't do TDD (Test-Driven Development)?
Yes, yes, yes, a million times yes.

Agile is a philosophy, TDD is a specific methodology.

If I wanted to be really picky I could simply point out that there are quite a few variations of xDD - which their advocates will explain in depth are not TDD - but those are still substantially bound up with test first so that would be cheating.

So lets says this - you can be agile without doing "test first" development (look at the way scrum works - nowhere in there are there specifics about how you write code). Look at a kanban board, look at all sorts of agile methodologies.

Do you want unit tests? Of course you do, for all kinds of reasons - and you might well make an argument that you can't be agile without unit tests (although I suspect that you can be) - but you don't have to write them first to be agile.

And finally, its equally true that you could do Test First without being Agile and strong arguments for doing test first regardless of your overall dev philosophy.



It seems that others (with a more SOLID rep) have a similar opinion...

http://www.twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/208621409663070208


  @unclebobmartin: http://t.co/huxAP5cS Though it's not impossible to do
  Agile without TDD and OOD, it is difficult.  Without TDD the iteration
  rate of...


(The link in the tweet is to the full answer on LinkedIn)
