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Comment by torial | Hacker News Reader

I've been following the TDD stuff as an outsider, and hands down the article that makes me consider it with the least skepticism is this one: http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/10/07/tdd-derange...

I'm sure there are issues w/ the various studies it cites, but it is the only one to actually address TDD from a productivity standpoint with some research data that I've seen. (More / better links welcome too!)

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Not to get sucked into a debate about TDD stuff, but to me the following blog post said all that needs to be about at least the TDD business and "gurus" (if not the whole methodology):

http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...

I agree to an extent - I just think it says a lot more about the individuals than the methodology. TDD doesn't magically transform bad solutions to good ones, and nobody should claim or expect that. It's a shame that what is really just a useful technique has been overhyped by people trying to make a buck.

I'd take the imperfect studies listed in the article I provided over two anecdotes. However, for the scenario of using TDD with the Sudoku, where it was done with less chaos, other anecdotes are there: http://johannesbrodwall.com/2010/04/06/why-tdd-makes-a-lot-o...

I say this as a person who likes Norvig more than I like TDD (I'm interested in TDD to see if it is useful for my day to day work, Norvig is more of my high level guilty pleasure, such as his spell checker article or his speech on using lots of data and then algorithm becomes less important)

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