How's that?
The implication seems to be that my job makes me biased about the topic. If so, that's precisely the wrong conclusion to draw.
The job isn't just advocacy, it's also (at the moment mostly) research and, where necessary, debunking of Agile. (For instance, learning more about probability theory has made me more skeptical of "planning poker".)
Prior to creating that job from scratch (including getting private funding to support my doing that job full-time), I'd supported myself by selling consulting and training as an expert on Scrum, Extreme Programming and Agile.
Institut Agile was the result of a conscious decision on my part to move to a professional position where I'd be able to afford a more rational assessment of the topic. For instance, I'm compiling an extensive bibliography of the existing empirical studies published that have attempted to verify the claimed benefits of TDD, and reviews and meta-analyses of these studies.
I'm quite interested in thoughtful critiques of TDD, provided that such criticism is expressed from a position of actually knowing something about the topic, or being willing to find out what the claims concerning TDD actually are.
To use a well-known form, if TDD works I desire to believe that TDD works, and if TDD doesn't work I desire to believe that it doesn't work.
From my point of view, our earlier conversation about TDD went weirdly because your responses stopped making sense for me starting from this one. For a while I attempted to correct for misunderstanding on my part and glean more information from you that could potentially change my mind, until that started looking like a lost cause.
For instance, I'm compiling an extensive bibliography of the existing empirical studies published that have attempted to verify the claimed benefits of TDD, and reviews and meta-analyses of these studies.
Is it available online?
A major psychology journal is planning to publish a study that claims to present strong evidence for precognition. Naturally, this immediately stirred up a firestorm. There are a lot of scientific-process and philosophy-of-science issues involved, including replicability, peer review, Bayesian statistics, and degrees of scrutiny. The Flying Spaghetti Monster makes a guest appearance.
Original New York Times article on the study here.
And the Times asked a number of academics (including Douglas Hofstadter) to comment on the controversy. The discussion is here.
I, for one, defy the data.