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A comment on Be professional, do TDD. Parent comment

Re:Be professional, do TDD by lyudmil on Wednesday October 27, 2010 @09:32AM (#1838486)
"Lenient" would imply that their approach skewed the results. If that's what you meant, could you explain why you say that? I'm hoping your explanation could lead to a testable hypothesis.

If you meant that they weren't rigorous in controlling variables related to team composition, I'd agree. However, I think those variables can safely be ignored if the study is repeated and validated many more times (which the authors acknowledge is a work in progress).

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Re:Be professional, do TDD by mhd on Wednesday October 27, 2010 @10:25AM (#1838713)
Project A:

TDD Team: 6 people, 24 man-months, no legacy code, 6 KLOC;

Trad Team: 2 people, 12 man-months, no indication whether it was a legacy project, whether they used unit testing at all (and if yes, what their coverage was).

Project B:

TDD Team: 8 people, 46 man-months, no legacy code, 26 KLOC

Trad Team: 12 people, 144 man-months, 149 KLOC, again no indication whether it was legacy, used unit testing etc.

The report mentions that they were comparable, because both teams reported to the same manager (Not too surprising for Microsoft).

I hope that there's more info about this study and that I'm a bit overreacting, but just given these tables, I wouldn't agree that we're talking about comparable teams and projects here.

So does this test unit-testing? Does it test TDD? Does it test development without legacy code vs legacy code? And even if you would get results, would it be the same for people with different experience levels? (Which is a problem for academic studies)

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