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on Dec 5th, 2011Where is the evidence?

Does TDD actually improve software quality?  Are good software developers an order of magnitude better than poor ones?  Do multiple code reviews reduce the number of bugs in the software?  Does your choice of language improve productivity? Do distributed version control systems increase the number of contributions?

Many software developers (myself included) have strong beliefs about many of these questions.  In fact, order a round of beers at EclipseCon and bring up any one of these topics and see what happens. Unfortunately, many of us base our arguments on our own experiences or anecdotes.  Occasionally we will quote some self proclaimed expert in the field and assume our argument is ‘proven’.  Is this evidence?

As tool developers — building the Best Integrated Development Environment icon smile Where is the evidence? — we need to hold ourselves to higher standards. We cannot be designing future IDEs based solely on what works well for me. If you have a few minutes, please watch the following video by Greg Wilson on Software Carpentry: Software Engineering Empirical Results. http://software-carpentry.org/4_0/softeng/ebse. I had the good fortune of meeting Greg a few years ago through the Canadian Consortium for Software Engineering. A much longer version of the talk is available (embedded below): http://vimeo.com/9270320.

Greg Wilson – What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True from CUSEC on Vimeo.

I prefer the longer one as I think he makes a much stronger point about questioning beliefs.

    3 responses so far eclipse,syndicate

    3 Responses to “Where is the evidence?”

    1. Kim Moir says:
      December 6, 2011 at 00:26

      Thanks for the link Ian – will be watching it. Greg also co-authored the Making Software book which has a is a great book on this very topic.

    2. Henrik Lindberg says:
      December 6, 2011 at 16:22

      Thanks for sharing – the long talk was very inspiring.
      I also got confirmation of some of my observations.
      Loved the conclusion about the purpose of University.

    3. Kim Moir says:
      December 7, 2011 at 04:38

      Thanks for the link Ian, I listened to it this afternoon while I was debugging some php. While I was listening I was thinking that this would make a great keynote at EclipseCon if the focus were shifted a bit to non-students. But really it’s a great talk if your a student or not. Very inspiring, Greg is one of my heroes :-)

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