"Model checking is to Bayesian data analysis as unit testing is to software engineering." Could you go into more detail?
In software engineering (I'm speaking only as someone who writes software as-needed and has friends in professional software development, not as an expert myself), one of the problems is that an engineer or analyst will believe they have solved a particular software problem prematurely. Just because their code compiles and gives the result they expected on the simple inputs they can think of off the top of their head doesn't mean it is ready to be shipped to the customer. For that, one needs to design suites of tests that check at various levels of resolut...
Andrew Gelman recently linked a new article entitled "Induction and Deduction in Bayesian Data Analysis." At his blog, he also described some of the comments made by reviewers and his rebuttle/discussion to those comments. It is interesting that he departs significantly from the common induction-based view of Bayesian approaches. As a practitioner myself, I am happiest about the discussion on model checking -- something one can definitely do in the Bayesian framework but which almost no one does. Model checking is to Bayesian data analysis as unit testing is to software engineering.
Added 03/11/12
Gelman has a new blog post today discussing another reaction to his paper and giving some additional details. Notably: