Recently I wrote a Ruby program to determine solutions to a "Scramble Squares" tile puzzle: I used TDD to implement most of it, leading to tests that looked like this: it "has top, bottom, left, right" do c = Cards.new card = c.cards[0] card.top.should == :CT card.bottom.should == :WB card.left.should == :MT card.right.should == :BT end This worked well for the lower-level "helper" methods: identifying the "sides" of a tile, determining if a tile can be validly placed in the grid, etc. But I ran into a problem when coding the actual algorithm to solve the puzzle. Since I didn't know valid possible solutions to the problem, I didn't know how to write a test first. I ended up writing a pretty ugly, untested, algorithm to solve it: def play_game working_states = [] after_1 = step_1 i = 0 after_1.each do |state_1| step_2(state_1).each do |state_2| step_3(state_2).each do |state_3| step_4(state_3).each do |state_4| step_5(state_4).each do |state_5| step_6(state_5).each do |state_6| step_7(state_6).each do |state_7| step_8(state_7).each do |state_8| step_9(state_8).each do |state_9| working_states << state_9[0] end end end end end end end end end So my question is: how do you use TDD to write a method when you don't already know the valid outputs? If you're interested, the code's on GitHub: Tests: https://github.com/mattdsteele/scramblesquares-solver/blob/master/golf-creator-spec.rb Production code: https://github.com/mattdsteele/scramblesquares-solver/blob/master/game.rb