TDD is a process where test code is written before or alongside production code to drive the design and development of a project. It involves writing automated unit tests to force decoupling of dependencies and provide comprehensive testing. TDD helps think through requirements and design before coding to catch early bugs. It is an incremental process where tests are written and run continuously to build confidence with each new feature added. The key steps are to write a test, make it compile even if it fails, run it to failure, implement the code to pass the test, then refactor and repeat the process.