I’m reading TDD By Example by Kent Beck right now and one of the Red Bar Patterns really resonated with me. It’s called the Learning Test. Here’s the scenario. You have a new library or framework that you’re implementing. Instead of just diving into TDD’ing the implementation, you can write some learning tests. These are tests where you validate how you expect the 3rd party tool to work for you. I see this as testing the contract between your application and the 3rd party tool.