Is there a difference between TDD and Test First Development (or Test First Programming)?

There's a difference in terms of what the driving factor is.

Do you have a vague idea of what the class (or system - this can happen at different scales, of course) should look like, then think up tests which give it the actual shape? That's TDD.

Do you know exactly what the public API of the class should be, and just write the tests before the implementation? That's test-first development.

My style tends to be a mixture of the two. Sometimes it's obvious what the API should be before writing any tests - in other cases testability really drives the design.

To put it another way, TDD starts with "What questions do I want to ask?" whereas non-TDD (whether test first or not) starts with "What answer do I want to give?"

They are basically different names describing the same thing - well, in fact five names, as the last D can stand for Design as well as for Development.

Test First was the term used originally, especially in the context of Extreme Programming, for the test-code-refactor cycle. The name Test Driven Development has been proposed - and quickly adopted - later, to stress the fact that TFD is - and always has been - more of a design strategy than a testing strategy.

Obviously today some people have different connotations for those two terms, but that wasn't the intent behind their existance, and I wouldn't rely on it being common knowledge (because it's not). In fact, I'd rather see the term TFD as being deprecated.

The are a lot of similar terms like test-first programming, test-first development, test-driven development or even test-driven design. It is important to clarify a few points:

1. Test First Programming (TFP)

The term test-first programming is a programming best practice. It was reintroduced (if not coined) by Kent Beck in his book “Extreme Programming Explained”: “Write unit tests before programming and keep all of the tests running at all times”. So, when talking about test-first programming we are talking about writing automated unit tests by the very developer that is going to write the code to satisfy those tests. The unit tests pile up and build an automated regression test suite that could be run periodically.

2. Test Driven Development (TDD)

Test-driven development (TDD) is the name of a methodology introduced by Kent Beck in his book "Test Driven Development by Example". It is a software development process, it is not only about writing tests before code. The whole book is trying to explain it by patterns, workflows, culture and so forth. One important aspect of it is the emphasis on refactoring.

Some people use the terms test-first development, test-driven design, or test-driven programming and ... One thing is for sure: the well established methodology is test-driven development and the programming technique is test-first programming. The rest are either generally referring to the idea of writing tests before code or mistakenly referring to test-driven development or test-first programming.