newt | 15 years ago | on: How To Make Wealth (2004)
newt's comments
newt | 15 years ago | on: Amazon Taking Down Erotica, Removing From Kindles
the world-wide cultural taboo against incest exists for a clearly defined reason
Of course it does. In other news, shooting people in the streets is generally considered bad, yet if you read a few thrillers and watch a few action movies, there will be gun battles. Fiction and real life: not the same.
newt | 15 years ago | on: We finally launched Zombal, your thoughts?
Agreed about the name. my first thought was http://www.zombo.com/
newt | 15 years ago | on: Anonymous in The Economist
make an exception for Assange because he's in the news?
because Swiss banks are so rigorous about closing the accounts of third-world tinpot dictators?
newt | 15 years ago | on: This year I mean it -- it's a bubble (2007)
The probability that there will be a bubble in some sector at some time in the future approaches 1.0
The probability that it has already started to inflate is supposed to be a lot less, but in the last decade and a half, it seems there have been a lot of bubbles in various parts of the economy.
newt | 15 years ago | on: The Effectiveness of Test Driven Development (With Case Studies)
You're repeating your false idea that bugs in TDD come only from the unit tests. Eh, see comments above.
newt | 15 years ago | on: This year I mean it -- it's a bubble (2007)
To be fair, it is possible to say "it's a bubble" and have to wait a few years to be proved right. It takes nerve to hang on until you're proved right. See The Big Short http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short for good examples of this during the recent sub-prime housing bubble.
newt | 15 years ago | on: Don't shoot the messenger for telling the truth
"Truth comes as conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it as friend."
- Rabindranath Tagore
newt | 15 years ago | on: BestBuy will sell Nexus S for $529 Unlocked (or $199 w/ 2 year contract)
Well, don't buy it with a contract then.
newt | 15 years ago | on: Amazon Route 53 - A New DNS Service from AWS
And neither does Amazon. And yet they claim to.
newt | 15 years ago | on: The Effectiveness of Test Driven Development (With Case Studies)
I'm not sure how TDD makes this worse. Unless you think that it absolves you of any end-to-end QA testing. In which case, welcome to the fire.
newt | 15 years ago | on: The Effectiveness of Test Driven Development (With Case Studies)
My confidence is from experience.
You could argue that without a coherent design, your next iteration is going to be longer. I'd argue the reverse - but it depends on what you mean by "big upfront design"
Every program, TDD or not, needs to get a basic architectural outline in place early on - e.g. decide if you're building a web app or a desktop client, which framework you'll use to build it. Usually you have a good idea of a lot of other major pieces of that you want in your architecture - they're there in "best practices" such as SOLID, repository pattern, CQRS, MVVM, etc. TDDs encourages "spikes" that prove the concept with a vertical slice through all layers of the app.
In my opinion and experience, "Big, upfront design" is a 1980s-1990s idea that all details of the program, not just the outlines, can be designed once before coding commences. And it is a completely false idea. TDD and agile say that you're going to redesign anyway, so you may as well accommodate that. This is where TDD speeds things up. Change is not just adding things to a program, it involves redesign on existing parts.
But I agree that an ounce of data is better than a pound of theory in this case. And number are far better than anecdote. That's what the article is for, I guess we should be reading it.
newt | 15 years ago | on: The Effectiveness of Test Driven Development (With Case Studies)
TDD defines bugs as "things the unit tests catch". And the unit tests are very narrow.
I think that if you read the article linked, you'd find that the study didn't work that way. Any study that measures different things between experiment and control groups is not going to be sound.
Then it gets to the field, and whatever you didn't catch becomes a 3-alarm fire.
I've worked on TDD projects, and those are definitely are counted as bugs. Severity 1.
newt | 15 years ago | on: The Effectiveness of Test Driven Development (With Case Studies)
In the marginal case where you only care about one iteration, then TDD is a little bit worse. However, I am confident that without TDD, your second iteration will be slower - you'll get less done, and your bug rate will still be higher.
newt | 15 years ago | on: The Effectiveness of Test Driven Development (With Case Studies)
I'm not sure what you mean by "TDD is the Cause of the bugs" - the TDD projects had 40-90% fewer bugs. Even if their remaining bugs would have been caught by test coverage of things that occur in live use, that's still a good result, right?
newt | 15 years ago | on: Missing the point of WikiLeaks
The second paragraph suggests that Julian Assange is just a lightning-rod, to deflect attention from the real work. Or at least is entirely replaceable. This may be true, any thought?
newt | 15 years ago | on: What Killed Waterfall Could Kill Agile
Once you prove your assertion, then I will present my evidence
No, please, be the bigger man and go first. heh.
newt | 15 years ago | on: What Killed Waterfall Could Kill Agile
Ok, that at least makes sense. But ... sudoku is a puzzle - you don't (or at least I didn't) get there by iteration and testing, you get there by a flash of insight - "if I try searching like this, I might be able to end up with a solution to any sudoku board" and few hours later I knew I was right. In that way, it is unlike almost all large-scale software development.
Agile can't generate insight from nothing, it's not a silver bullet. But at least if you have some unit tests around your cool new code, you know that you won't accidentally break it later.
newt | 15 years ago | on: What Killed Waterfall Could Kill Agile
I don't think that you know agile that well. If you define agile as "hacks" then it's no surprise that only hacks will match your definition of agile.
"requirements for a (short) release cycle" is a good description for a scrum sprint backlog. Scrum or agile does not say that you can't have "Specs, designs, and dot releases" in some form if you need them.
newt | 15 years ago | on: What Killed Waterfall Could Kill Agile
I agree with you totally, but maybe the wording or formatting was what people saw first. What works sometimes is not just calling "bullshit" on a shoddy post but going the extra mile that the shoddy post didn't.
Come on. Startups are long shots, a gamble, definitely not a reliable bet. Most startups fail ( http://hubpages.com/hub/why-startups-fail ) and very few are massive successes. It's the rock-star model of getting rich - many try, few succeed.
Was a "venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages" a "reliable way to get rich" ? There were pirates, the danger of sinking the ship in storms or on rocks, scurvy, unpredictable conditions at the other end of the voyage etc... basically it's high risk, high reward.