Re:The Pragmatics of TDD
by MartinCron on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @02:51PM
(#5333364)
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.
Re:The Pragmatics of TDD
by MartinCron on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @04:16PM
(#5334005)
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.
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.....