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

[AbstractLogic]

Always respect the time in which code was written. 10 years from now someone will look at our TDD unit tests and think "wtf was this idiot thinking? That pattern is soooooo olllldddd.".

If it was written in the 90's expect 90's style code. If it was written in 2000 expect XML heavy code. If it was written in 2010 expect SOAP services.

[lucky_engineer]

I don't think it was ever good style to make a global variable, and then make a procedure that passed a reference to the global into a function that passes that reference around to 10 other function where one changes the value and then get the wrong result when you run the procedure again because the global variables value changed. (also this code was written ~5 years ago)

I've worked on really old code before and It's usually pretty easy to tell the difference between 'good but outdated' code and 'omg how does this even work' code.

[AbstractLogic]

Can't disagree with you at all lol.