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I would be interested in a list of the tools you use daily and your list of research publications that prove that those specific tools improve productivity, rel

I would be interested in a list of the tools you use daily and your list of research publications that prove that those specific tools improve productivity, reliability, or whatever metric you have named in selecting them.

geofft 7y ago
That's a fair question, and it is absolutely fair and correct for you to imply that I don't have any. However, the comment above (which was not me) said "studies cited, case studies presented or concrete examples," not just studies. I was taking objection to the claim that merely coming out of academia counts as a "study" in this sense. I don't need an experimental study (though I would love to have one), a body of anecdotes of successful uses of a tool is sufficient. I can name countless case studies, concrete examples, and anecdotes of people using the programming languages and software environments I use successfully. There is a large body of evidence that, say, Linux works fine, whether or not a paper says as much. (And, in particular, there is a sizable body of anecdotal evidence that OpenStack does not work fine, and I've been pushing my team to find a migration strategy out of OpenStack for this exact reason.) Also, I think the burden of proof is on someone advocating for change. When I am delivering software successfully, and someone else comes in and says "You need to be taking this approach," I think it's fair for me to say "Why?", and that that's very different from staring blankly at bash and saying "Why?" and refusing to type anything. And finally I would actually be delighted to have real metrics for my tools. I do want to know if, say, enforcing style checks via pre-commit hooks makes development velocity faster and avoids annoying developers! It certainly seems like it would but it sounds like an easy enough thing to test, and I wish we as an industry (and more specifically people in either academia or industry who see their work as advocating for better software development practices, not developing software) would spend the time to test it.

geofft 7y ago

That's a fair question, and it is absolutely fair and correct for you to imply that I don't have any. However, the comment above (which was not me) said "studies cited, case studies presented or concrete examples," not just studies. I was taking objection to the claim that merely coming out of academia counts as a "study" in this sense. I don't need an experimental study (though I would love to have one), a body of anecdotes of successful uses of a tool is sufficient. I can name countless case studies, concrete examples, and anecdotes of people using the programming languages and software environments I use successfully. There is a large body of evidence that, say, Linux works fine, whether or not a paper says as much. (And, in particular, there is a sizable body of anecdotal evidence that OpenStack does not work fine, and I've been pushing my team to find a migration strategy out of OpenStack for this exact reason.) Also, I think the burden of proof is on someone advocating for change. When I am delivering software successfully, and someone else comes in and says "You need to be taking this approach," I think it's fair for me to say "Why?", and that that's very different from staring blankly at bash and saying "Why?" and refusing to type anything. And finally I would actually be delighted to have real metrics for my tools. I do want to know if, say, enforcing style checks via pre-commit hooks makes development velocity faster and avoids annoying developers! It certainly seems like it would but it sounds like an easy enough thing to test, and I wish we as an industry (and more specifically people in either academia or industry who see their work as advocating for better software development practices, not developing software) would spend the time to test it.