3 ms·
There is a problem with all these studies - they all use a very small amount of programmers (21 in this case) with no experience (all graduate students in this
by inglor 10y ago
There is a problem with all these studies - they all use a very small amount of programmers (21 in this case) with no experience (all graduate students in this case) and presumably no significant experience with TDD or TLD.
I'm not making a stand about TDD here - I just think we need to have much better computer engineering science studies if we want to have significant results.
- wpietri 10y agoAgreed. I also would question the short time scale of the test. It took me a year or so to really get good at test-driven development. I also think of TDD as a sustainability practice. If I'm writing a small thing that I do not intend to maintain, I won't bother with TDD (or with tests at all). But I'll definitely TDD something where I expect to come back to it frequently, especially when I initially don't know the requirements, and I expect requirements to change over time. In practice, I suspect a lot of the interesting questions about software are effectively unanswerable with the budgets available to CS profs. I can't imagine really answering this question without doing something of the scope of a substantial medical study.
- nostrebored 10y agoReally don't know why you're being downvoted. Grad students at diploma mills are awful programmers, and even those in real labs are good at putting out proof of concepts, not production code.