Trying to convince people is a losing battle in a misguided war. The fact that people out there will continue to disagree with you no matter what you say is part of life. Just make the best contribution that you can, and if someone gets value out of it, great.

The fact that some software development organizations out there aren't using any test automation* even though they would probably benefit from it might make me a little sad, but it's not a problem that I'm trying to solve.

*or source control, or deployment automation, or incrementalism, whatever.

You might not convince everybody all the time, but I don't think that trying to convince people is necessarily a waste of time if you have a good argument.

There are plenty of things that most people take for granted now that people previously would not have believed.

With enough supporting data it would be hard to argue against TDD, for example an independent study of a sizeable number of software shops which showed that developers using TDD shipped code 50% faster or with 60% fewer defects or whatever. That would put the onus on the anti-TDD person.

I think Zed Shaw wrote something about this, but can't find the link.

The closest I can find is this, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/ese/nagappan_tdd.....

I guess so. It's just so easy to be defeatist when any useful tool or technique can be summarily dismissed by jaded technologists as "snake oil". I've had to come to terms with the fact that from my perspective, lots of developers are just "doing it wrong"

The definition of snake oil is basically medicine that has a claimed benefit but little/no supporting evidence.

Once you have strong backing data , it's not snake oil anymore and it becomes increasingly difficult to make that claim.

Backing data that's strong enough to satisfy some critics is impossible to obtain.

Anecdotes? Obviously not OK.

Small-scale controlled experiments can be dismissed as nothing more than pointless toy exercises that have no bearing on real-world production code.

Large-scale controlled experiments are impractical. Blinding and placebos aren't possible. Isolating confounding elements such as individual performance would be difficult.

Burden of proof is burdensome, I guess.

Basically yes. I'm sure it would be possible to do a good study but very expensive. Although if the potential upside is increasing the productivity of an entire industry maybe it's worth doing.