I see where you're coming from, totally. I personally have moved to thinking about writing tests concurrently. That is, maybe a bit before, maybe a bit after, but as a first-class development effort worthy of "real" developer time and not a half-assed afterthought that is delegated to "lesser" team members.
I don't throw around looks of disgust or shame people, but I insist that in 2014, if you don't have meaningful test automation, you don't have much credibility.
Here's the crux of my argument, quality code is not a function of the number of tests. I tried real TDD 5 years ago and I can assure you code I write today (with less tests) is better than the more tested code I wrote 5 years ago.
This means that there is not a clear correlation between number of tests and clean code, yet that is the central premise of the testing religion.
I don't throw around looks of disgust or shame people, but I insist that in 2014, if you don't have meaningful test automation, you don't have much credibility.
I wrote about all of this thrashing over four years ago and I am kind of heartbroken that the conversation hasn't really moved forward at all. http://martin.cron.com/2009/10/21/oh-no-not-more-of-the-same...