Revenge of the Duct Tape Programmer - skipping unit tests to ship faster

Image via Wikipedia

Hey, something like proof that going without unit-tests will let you ship faster, but at the penalty of technical debt in the code base. (I realize that isn't _exactly_ what was demonstrated ;)

Exploding Software-Engineering Myths - Microsoft Research: "

“The nice thing about working at Microsoft,” Nagappan says, “is that the development organization is large enough that we could select teams that allowed for an apples-to-apples comparison. We picked three development projects under the same senior manager and looked at teams that used TDD and those that didn’t. We collected data from teams working on Visual Studio, Windows, and MSN and also got data from a team at IBM, since the project was a joint study.”

The study and its results were published in a paper entitled Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams, by Nagappan and research colleagues E. Michael Maximilien of the IBM Almaden Research Center; Thirumalesh Bhat, principal software-development lead at Microsoft; and Laurie Williams of North Carolina State University. What the research team found was that the TDD teams produced code that was 60 to 90 percent better in terms of defect density than non-TDD teams. They also discovered that TDD teams took longer to complete their projects—15 to 35 percent longer.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

“Over a development cycle of 12 months, 35 percent is another four months, which is huge,” Nagappan says. “However, the tradeoff is that you reduce post-release maintenance costs significantly, since code quality is so much better. Again, these are decisions that managers have to make—where should they take the hit? But now, they actually have quantified data for making those decisions.”"

Jason Calacanis on How To Kill Google

Image by John Niedermeyer via Flickr

I am a fan of Google, but I would love to see the top five mainstream-media sites be exclusively indexed by Bing. It would be a real-world test of how effectively Google is able to monetize search compared to Microsoft/Yahoo. Right now we can only guess. If this really took place, bloggers would be the big winners, because they would leap to the top of the searches. Anyone who thinks there is better reporting in the mainstream media just hasn't read the top bloggers in their particular area of expertise and interest. Mainstream reporters have to pull their punches.

See [Secret Diary of Steve Jobs]: "Why the mainstream media is dying"

http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/11/why-mainstream-media-is-dying.html

The best reporters of the top five mainstream media sites would have a reason to move to Huffington Post, if Google can raise Huffington Posts hits, if Google can effectively monetize those hits, and if Huffington Post's business model allows more money to flow to the people actually writing the stories.

I would love to see it all play out - to see what would really happen.

Image via CrunchBase

Jason Calacanis on How To Kill Google: "

I favorited a YouTube video: Jason Calacanis shares how Microsoft Bing can kill Google by partnering with news organizations such as the New York Times. Clipped from episode #24 of This Week in Startups with Gary Vaynerchuk Visit http://www.thisweekinstartups.com for more

"

Pownce is still down

Today was rough, domain controller bit the dust it really only took down DHCP, no biggie, somewhere along the way it looks like we had a redundant DNS i have half a mind not to use the Microsoft DHCP, it is stupid but maybe don't really have a choice