Emphasis on TDD in 1972

During the touring lecture in 1972, Edsger W. Dijkstra talked about the topic “The Humble Programmer”.  During this lecture he makes a statement, which I think is really revolutionary….

Those who want really reliable software will discover that they must find  means of avoiding the majority of bugs to start with, and as a result the programming process will become cheaper. If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging – they should not introduce bugs to start with.

Is he not talking about avoiding the wastes of Product development, one of the lean principles ?

Is he not talking about the Test Driven Development ?

 

Complete excepts from his lecture could be found here.

Even though such pointers to TDD has been propagated by thought leaders since 1970s, it is very sad to see hardly a few programmers follow this great practice even after 3 decades.

Science of Learning: My personal Experience

 

 

Recently  I read Mark Levison’s article Science of Learning:Best approaches for brain. He takes an example such as why many developers find it hard to grasp topics like Unit testing.
As trainers, coaches and mentors many people tend to use traditional way of  presentations(i.e. power point) to train people. However, these presentation ways of  coaching gets into short term memory.

In order to make an abstract idea stay in long term memory, several techniques are available. For example, making the training more visual, asking leading questions and sharing concrete examples that relate to what the audience already know.

In my Agile training programs, I have been already applying some of them concepts. For example, asking the trainees to think about solving the issues in their projects and then relating it back to Agile values and principles. 

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