Hacker News Reader

Meh? I build a suduko solver one night on my own in 2-3 hours. I've seen agile do much more than that. What are you trying to say?

View on HN

I think it's referring to the sudoku TDD blog series that happened a few years back. Essentially, someone tried to implement a sudoku solver using TDD - and after several posts, never managed to finish. Peter Norvig then came along and wrote a short elegant implementation.

Some use this to say TDD - which has ties to agile - doesn't work. But most people conclude that TDD isn't a silver bullet and you have to know about your problem domain before diving in.

Here's someone elses' blog post which includes links to both sets of posts: http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...

Ok, that at least makes sense. But ... sudoku is a puzzle - you don't (or at least I didn't) get there by iteration and testing, you get there by a flash of insight - "if I try searching like this, I might be able to end up with a solution to any sudoku board" and few hours later I knew I was right. In that way, it is unlike almost all large-scale software development.

Agile can't generate insight from nothing, it's not a silver bullet. But at least if you have some unit tests around your cool new code, you know that you won't accidentally break it later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com