In my opinion TDD is a good thing, but too demanding and too strict. In real life, there are very different knowledge / experience levels in a development team and if TDD is not applied professionally, it may not help. It just needs a lot of practise and experience.
What it helps with a lot is improving your individual programming skills. So I recommend TDD to everyone, who never did it in practise (best case on a legacy code base) - if not to improve the code itself, then just to LEARN how it could improve your code.
It helped me to understand, why IoC and Dependency Injection are a thing and when to use it. Writing "testable" code is important, while writing real tests may be not as important, as long as you do not plan to have along running project or do a major refactoring. If you ARE planning a major refactoring, you should first write the tests to ensure you don't break anything, though ;)
What I also would recommend is having a CI / Build-Environment supporting TDD, SonarQube and CodeCoverage - not trying to establish that afterwards... Being able to switch to TDD is also a very neat way to get a nice CI setup.
My feeling is, that my programming and deployment skills improved best, when I did one of my personal pet projects strictly test driven with automated CI and found out about the things in TDD and CI, I really need to care about.
What it helps with a lot is improving your individual programming skills. So I recommend TDD to everyone, who never did it in practise (best case on a legacy code base) - if not to improve the code itself, then just to LEARN how it could improve your code.
It helped me to understand, why IoC and Dependency Injection are a thing and when to use it. Writing "testable" code is important, while writing real tests may be not as important, as long as you do not plan to have along running project or do a major refactoring. If you ARE planning a major refactoring, you should first write the tests to ensure you don't break anything, though ;)
What I also would recommend is having a CI / Build-Environment supporting TDD, SonarQube and CodeCoverage - not trying to establish that afterwards... Being able to switch to TDD is also a very neat way to get a nice CI setup.
My feeling is, that my programming and deployment skills improved best, when I did one of my personal pet projects strictly test driven with automated CI and found out about the things in TDD and CI, I really need to care about.