[Morendil]

I'm all too aware of these many citations. A few years ago, I went to the trouble of chasing down most of the papers and books, and evaluating how well each of them supported the claim. To put it mildly, I was underwhelmed.

For just one example, here's my treatment of Grady: http://lesswrong.com/lw/9sv/diseased_disciplines_the_strange...

It's not just me. Here's another author of a book aimed at software professionals who attempted some fact-checking, and came up short: http://www.sicpers.info/2012/09/an-apology-to-readers-of-tes...

I, too, used to argue for practices such as test-driven development, based on the supposedly firm knowledge of the "cost of defects curve". I changed my mind about the cost of defects when I saw how poor the data was. This is me in 2010: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2rc/coding_rationally_test_driven_de... and this is me two years later, recanting: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2rc/coding_rationally_test_driven_de...

However, I haven't (entirely) changed my mind about TDD and similar practices. I do still believe it pays to strive to write only excellent code that is easy to reason about. I like to think that I now have stronger and better thought out reasons to believe that.

[mixmastamyk]

Looks like you've done your homework. Yet in my experience it has been true that the farther in space and time I've been from a bug, the harder it was to solve.

So now I'm a bit confused on how to proceed.