

Motivating Minds (The Economist on why TDD makes you work harder) - friism
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12971028

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bena
This doesn't really apply to TDD in any way that can't be applied to other
methods. This article is just about how too many choices cause paralysis when
making a decision.

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enomar
That's a pretty deceptive title. It's friism's conclusion that TDD makes you
work harder, not The Economist's. I'm not saying I disagree with the notion,
but half the reason I read the article was to find out why The Economist might
be talking about TDD.

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yters
That's why the interpretation is in parentheses.

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friism
Yeah, the conondrum of how to sum up the relevance of an article in a
headline. I didn't mean to deceive, merely to give an edge to original titel.

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yters
That's because breaking an abstract task into concrete steps is a task in
itself. So, people with an abstract task have more to do than those who just
have concrete steps.

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jderick
Often the most difficult task, I would say.

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andr
Actually it explains why breaking up tasks into smaller tasks makes you more
efficient. TDD is just one way to do this.

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friism
You're absolutely right.

I still think the article is uniquely relevant to TDD however, in that TDD
explicitly mandates chopping tasks into small chunks and this research seems
to validate that approach.

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sgk284
I think you may be introducing some bias to your conclusions. The article
could also be seen as concluding that giving someone abstract tasks is less
efficient then giving someone a concrete task...the former leaves a lot open
to decide, the latter makes your problem space much smaller so I'm not sure if
they are fair to compare ( the former does actually involve quite a but more
work ). It's like sitting down with someone and you say "Write a ten page
story." instead of "Write a ten page story about a green monster living at the
top of a snowy mountain." People given the second choice will almost always
start writing immediately, and those given the former will sit around and
think for hours about what to write. And when you look at the conclusions of
the article like this, you can make a strong counter-point against TDD and
that is simply that you can't get much more abstract then by being asked to
write tests for code and functionality that doesn't even exist yet. (Note: I'm
a fan of TDD, but for the million other reasons)

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ahoyhere
FWIW, psychological research (into the area of manamagent quality initiatives,
self-help techniques, etc) has shown that adoption of any system works because
of the attention applied to the situation, and I'd stretch that to include
code, too.

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pj
Terrible. This is not science. I do not at all agree with the conclusions.
There is only a correlation, but the cause/effect relationship they infer is
shady at best.

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yters
I haven't seen many studies not based in the physical sciences where this
isn't true.

