Software Engineering's Greatest Hits

What Hacker News said

Strong rec nestorD · 2022-08 · on “I have complicated feelings about TDD”

There are quantitative studies showing that TDD has little to no impact development time or code quality[0]. What has been found, however, is that writing code in short increments helps a lot (something that can be caused by using TDD). For more information on studies covering the topic (and much more), I highly recommend watching Greg Wilson's Software Engineering's Greatest Hits[1]. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [this video]

Recommends dang · 2021-07 · on “Software engineering research is a train wreck”

That (or more likely [this video] since that's where the info is) would make a good HN submission in its own right. Probably best to wait a few days to let the hivemind caches clear (followup/copycat posts aren't great: [LINK] ). If you submit it, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can put it in the second-chance pool ( [LINK] , explained at [LINK] ), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.

Cites Supermancho · 2022-05 · on “I don't know how to build software”

> Most of the critics of waterfall haven't actually worked in such a project. I wouldn't say that's true. > Most of the critics of either C or javascript haven't actually built anything noteworthy with it. That's oddly out-of-place gatekeeping. I've built large things in C 25 years ago that didn't get finished or weren't put in production. That's enough to learn about C, at the time . > Most of the critics of OOP don't have much practical experience with it I wouldn't say that's true. I read a collection of thoughts that feels like a combination of imposter syndrome (20 applications in 20 years? yeesh, that's sparse) and blanket characterization through arbitrary gatekeeping. I understand wh

Cites Supermancho · 2022-05 · on “Ask HN: How did you learn good program design?”

There is some evidence that shows learning design patterns makes them developers better, which is a very specific finding - [this video]