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Sunday, July 25, 2010

Emphasis on TDD in 1972

image 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.

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