Fact and folklore in software engineering

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http://morendil.github.com/folklore.html

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The trouble with opinions is that everyone has their own; you can always find one to suit any given prejudice. “Test-driven development reduces defect count”, says one expert; “test-driven development will wreck your architecture”, says the next.

Knowledge cannot be disseminated merely by everyone having a blog of their own. Blogs are great for voicing opinions - are they ever - and for having debates, but it’s unhealthy for debate to go on forever. We look to scientists for settling them.

One debate (if it can be called that) which has gone on for too long without a satisfactory resolution concerns programmer productivity and the often quoted “observation” or “fact” that the best programmers are 10 times better than the worst. I will come back to the origins of this observation, but it isn’t quite the topic of this article.

This article is about why some “facts” refuse to die, and about how to avoid