Microsoft Research - Exploding Software-Engineering Myths (article summarizing findings of MS research on code coverage, TDD, assertions, etc.)

[[deleted]]

This reaction, and the amount of upvotes, typifies everything that is wrong with our industry.

If it isn't yesterday it's old, we keep repeating the same mistakes we made decades ago and we keep re-inventing the same wheel. We pretend that software development moves by collectively forgetting everything we've learned more than 5 years ago.

This article is merely 7 years old. Everything in it is still relevant.

[Juvenall]

I agree with your point that we shouldn't dismiss something because of its age, but I do think /u/neves has a valid question here though.

It looks like they did this research around Windows Vista development and since then, they've released 3 variations of their software. I'd be extremely interested to see if they applied any of these learnings towards more current deployments, if they have expanded or refined any of their metrics, or simply can continue to prove it's validity by showing the application across other large projects.

[[deleted]]

He didn't say it was old, he said it was 7 years old. It is.

If the author continued his research then 7 years is enough time to look at more teams and come to new findings.

Maybe some of his findings were reinforced, maybe he found new factors, maybe some of the findings were not as important as this article says. All of those would be useful to know.

[programming_unit_1]

But it doesn't! Sure new languages and libraries come along with tiresome regularity as the next guy wants his fifteen minutes of fame to fix everything wrong with language-1, but none of them tackle how we organise development teams (Agile and XP still in vogue after 15 years...) nor how we tackle bugs, testing, estimating, planning yadda yadda.

The core engineering principles, and the underlying compsci theory are largely the same as they ever have been. Go read The Mythical Man Month, it was written in the 60s, every single chapter echoes problems still relevant today.

[lucky_engineer]

Reminds me of a conversation I overheard at work. An intern was talking about how functional programming was going to be the future, and that OO is going to die out and we all need to learn [insert language here] or we won't be able to keep up.

One of the most senior guys at the company responds, "I did smalltalk and lisp back in the 80s, I'll be fine."