An External Replication on the Effects of Test-driven Development [pdf]

Re:An External Replication on the Effects of Test-driven Dev... by hackuser on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @02:11AM (#12741492)

While I can see your point of view, perhaps that is an ideal and not a realistic view of how science actually works. Similarly, someone might have an ideal view of software development, but if they saw how it actually worked and read actual in-production code ... and I think that describes every profession.

Science does work pretty well; it predicts things with accuracy and reliability otherwise unknown by humanity (AFAIK). It's an interesting question: If not by hewing close to this ideal, how does it actually achieve results?

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Re:An External Replication on the Effects of Test-driven Dev... by adwn on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @03:27AM (#12741799)

You're conflating the "hard" sciences (which rely on reproducible experiments to explore natural laws) with the "soft" sciences (which rely on studies to explore human behavior). The track record of the latter is significantly worse than that of the former. Software engineering, and by extension this study, falls firmly into the soft sciences territory.

You should be a lot more sceptical of supposed facts in soft sciences than in hard sciences. Not because of prejudice or arrogance, but because it's much harder to be reasonably certain about anything in a soft science than in a hard science.

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Re:An External Replication on the Effects of Test-driven Dev... by hackuser on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @08:43AM (#12743211)

I know the differences you are referring to talking about. I mean all sciences, but really I mean that we need to hear from actual practitioners about how they really work.

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