---
title: "Creativity in Coding - Does TDD Leave Room For it?"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2013/6/3/creativity-in-coding-does-tdd-leave-room-for-it.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2013/6/3/creativity-in-coding-does-tdd-leave-room-for-it.html"
published: "2013-06-03T12:18:53"
updated: "2013-06-03T12:18:53"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "“Is there any room left for creativity in coding?” That’s hilarious. Let’s reach back in time… As poets focus more on rhyme schemes and meter, where is there room for creativity? Now they have this new-fangled thing…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Creativity in Coding - Does TDD Leave Room For it?

By Roy Osherove June 3, 2013

**Historical article** · Originally published June 3, 2013; technical details may be outdated.

>  “Is there any room left for creativity in coding?” That’s hilarious.
>
> Let’s reach back in time…
>
> As poets focus more on rhyme schemes and meter, where is there room for creativity? Now they have this new-fangled thing called a “sonnet.” It has to be exactly 14 lines long, all in iambic pentameter, with each of the first 3 groups of lines following an abab rhyme scheme, and the final two a rhyming couplet. Is there are any room left for creativity in poetry?
>
> To ask the question is to demonstrate that one does not understand the industry and the practices one whit. Creativity does not mean undisciplined hacking.

Thank you, [TDD Mailing List’s **Russell Gold**](http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/testdrivendevelopment/message/35479).


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

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### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/