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Comment by Sandman | Hacker News Reader

I'd be genuinely interested in reading a paper on what impact these methodologies have on software development. Does anybody know of any research on this topic?

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http://evidencebasedse.com/ Collects papers on SE practices. They claim to have 33 papers on TDD and 40 on testing in general.

Thanks for this

I found this:

http://proceedings.informingscience.org/InSITE2012/InSITE12p...

Among other things, it includes a long list of references -- taken after searching based on:

http://mango2.vtt.fi/virtual/agile/publications.html

That again was referenced in the following blog post from 2007, that I found more interesting (if rather similar) to op:

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=216434

I also came across this interview/discussion:

"Jim Coplien and Bob Martin Debate TDD" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtHQGs3zFAM

Since I wrote that article I've found one or two papers about the subject, one of them was one that I heard about in .Net Rocks, it compared code reviews with unit testing, but I can't find it :S While I was searching I found this one from NCSU and Microsoft: "On the Effectiveness of Unit Test Automation at Microsoft": http://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/Papers/Unit_testing... It's not about TDD although they mention it in the paper. I'll try to find that one about code reviews and post it here as well

Found that paper about code reviews, it is mentioned in this blog post: http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/the-best-ways-to-find-bugs-in-y... And here's the link to the paper itself: http://kev.inburke.com/docs/basili_testing.pdf

All those practices are good (tdd, code review, etc) if people know what they're doing

Otherwise:

Sometimes code review will turn into a pissing match of who can find the most errors in other people's code

TDD will turn into a quest for a higher "coverage number" regardless of the actual testing quality

A pissing match of who can find the most errors in other people's code is probably a good thing :P It's when it starts being about personal aesthetic preferences without any consequences in terms of code readability/quality that I think it starts to be annoying.

Yes, there's usually a finite amount of errors in a given code.

But it's mostly about, as you said, personal preferences or 'philosophies' regardless of the actual results of the code.

So you waste a lot of time because someone thinks the way you did it is not 'OO enough' or 'should be organized better' even if it is working (I'm not talking about code that's messy)

I found this paper NCSU a while back: http://staff.unak.is/andy/MScTestingMaintenance/Homeworks/ST...

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