This has been one of the craziest weeks in my IT career, but perhaps one good thing has become of it.

Before and after I became Tech Lead, I've been trying to convince everyone that [Test-driven Development][] is really The Way. But I still heard things like, "I have the the code done, now I have to write the tests." So, really, my message wasn't getting through.

This week was Panic Mode in a big way. Long story, but me and another guy worked all day and three to four hours at night, and an offshore resource worked all our night (his day) and three or four hours in his night. I'm not saying that it was a job well done nor that I relished it, but one good thing came out of it . . . On Thursday, my on-shore cohort said, "You know, Mike, writing the tests first is really a good thing! Now I know that my code works every time!" And we demonstrated problems with each others logic via unit tests and then we knew what to fix.

He told me this several times during the day, but I knew he was a True Believer when I heard him tell our off-shore guy, "Yeah, I know you fixed it, but you didn't make any Junits for it."

Now he sounds like me!