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I think tests are a good idea, and I’m a huge fan of TDD in general. Building Conduit implementations without tests are a large time investment as is, so we originally didn’t include testing in the spec because we figured that if people wanted it, then it would be a great “extra credit” objective for the repo. For example, the Angular 2 repo had a request for unit tests and folks are now starting to work on a PR for it.

Another reason we didn’t include them in the spec is actually from this line in the current spec:

> The quality & architecture of Conduit implementations should reflect something similar to an early stage startup's MVP: functionally complete & stable, but not unnecessarily over-engineered.

Most startups I know that work in consumer facing apps (like Conduit) don’t apply TDD until they have solid product-market fit, which is smart because they then spend most of their time iterating on product & UI and thus are far more likely to find PMF.

This doesn’t mean that TDD === over-engineering, but in certain circumstances that statement does evaluate true (ex: consumer product finding PMF, sideprojects, robust prototypes, etc).

So TL;DR — we chose to not have a strict requirement for TDD in these repos, but we'd definitely prefer all of them to include excellent tests if the maintainers are willing to add it (or if someone in the community is kind enough to make a pull request :)