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Is TDD better than Apps Hungarian?

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Andrew Dalke

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Nickname: dalke
Registered: Sep, 2003

Andrew Dalke is a consultant and software developer in computational chemistry and biology.
Is TDD better than Apps Hungarian? Posted: Dec 13, 2012 1:42 PM
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Greg Wilson and Jorge Aranda's essay Two Solitudes describes the different viewpoints and additudes between software engineering researchers and practicioners. Here is one of the complaints:

At industry-oriented gatherings, it seems that a strong opinion, a loud voice, and a couple of pints of beer constitute "proof" of almost any claim. Take test-driven development, for example. If you ask its advocates for evidence, they'll tell you why it has to be true; if you press them, you'll be given anecdotes, and if you press harder, people will be either puzzled or hostile.

Most working programmers simply don't know that scientists have been doing empirical studies of TDD, and of software development in general, for almost forty years. It's as if family doctors didn't know that the medical research community existed, much less what they had discovered. Once again, the first step toward bridging this gulf seemed to be to get each group to tell the other what they knew.
Greg worked with Andy Oram to collect and edit the essays in Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It, as a way to present some of that research evidence to software practicioners. The Two Solitudes essay refers to that book, saying its "topics range from the impact of test-driven development on productivity (probably small, if there is one at all) to whether machine learning techniques can predict fault rates in software modules (yes, with the right training)."

Why is there a debate over TDD?

Did you catch the "probably small, if there is one at all" part? Why then is there a continued debate over the effectiveness of TDD when the conclusion from reseach is that there is at best only a small improvement in productivity? The Two Solitudes essay goes into some of the possible reasons. You should read it.

That got me to thinking about other well-accepted or well-rejected practices: version control software and Apps Hungarian notation. We as practicioners generally accept that version control software is a Good Thing and generally view Apps Hungarian as a negative. If we "know" that version control systems are useful, then can software engineering researchers find experimental evidence to support or reject the claim? If they have, then it might be an example of what a successful research experiment might look like. If it can't, then perhaps it says something about the weakness of the current experimental approaches compared to personal experience.

We can ask the same about other development practices. Can software testing show if Apps Hungarian improves productivity over other variable naming systems?

With those experiments in place we could start asking questions like "are the gains from introducing TDD to the process more like the gains in introducing Apps Hungarian, or more like the gains in introducing Mercurial?" Or more crudely, "is TDD more effective than Apps Hungarian?"

(For "TDD" put pair programming, unit tests, coverage analysis, version control systems, or most any other practice.)

So let's ask the software engineering researchers if they can provide evidence for those beliefs of the practicioners. Perhaps they've done it already?

Do version control systems make people more productive?

As far as I can see (which isn't very far), no one has done experimental research to tell if a version control system makes people more productive. I asked Greg, and he was a bit chagrined to reply that he didn't know of any published research either. Yes, he promotes that everyone use a version control system, despite not knowing of research evidence to back that belief.

Curious, isn't it?

My challenge to researchers is, can you carry out experiments to test the effectiveness of version control software for different types of projects?

This research, like TDD, is complicated by many real-world factors. There are alternatives to using version control software:

  • Don't use any version control software, just one directory,
  • Depend on system backups (including Time Machine for the Mac),
  • Make manual backups of the working code from time, as a tar/zip file, or saved to another directory,
  • Use a versioning filesystem, which might be a distributed file system;
different development scenarios:
  • Single developer,
  • Pair-programming using the same account,
  • Multiple developers all using the same file system,
  • Multiple developers across multiple sites;
different types of developers:
  • Trained as software developers,
  • ... electrical engineers,
  • ... computational scientists,
  • Undergraduates in a first semester programming course;
and even different needs:
  • Research spikes where the code is thrown away at the end,
  • Scientific research where one person works on a new approach for several months, publishes a paper, and never works on it again,
  • Traditional main-branch-development-only coding,
  • Multi-branch development and multiple supported releases.

It sounds like a lot of work to test these possibilities when we already know the answer, but that's my point. If research methods can't address this question then how do we trust those methods on other topics, like TDD or pair-programming?

Perhaps the research will point out something interesting. Perhaps it will find that research projects which take less than three months and where there is only one developer are 10% more effective using automatic versioning file system over a manual version control system. If that were true, perhaps we should recommend that most scientists use a versioning file system instead of version control.

Or perhaps we should develop better connections between the various file system monitoring tools (like inotify) and the version control systems, to give an automatic/no-touch interface to the version control system.

For that matter, some people start continuous integration tests based on checkins. Why not do CI based on filesystem changes? Obviously some will commit less often, but perhaps productivity will improve.

I can continue to conjecture, but of course, without evidence it's little better than blather. The world is full of blather. That's why we need research.

Does Apps Hungarian make people more productive?

Hungarian Notation is a classic topic. Quoting from Michael Feathers on the c2.com wiki page:

Hungarian notation inspires some of the most bitter religious wars among programmers. Detractors claim that it is indecipherable and that no real standards exist for its usage. Adherents claim that it becomes more likeable with use, and the instant mnemonic recognition of type that one gains with familiarity aids program comprehension immensely.

Hungarian notation seems to be in decline. Microsoft's .Net "General Naming Conventions" document says outright "Do not use Hungarian notation." Nor is Hungarian the de facto style in any of the few dozen languages that I'm familiar with, though some libraries, especially those with a Microsoft heritage, do use it.

This despite the efforts of people like Joel Spolsky to promote a distinction between Apps Hungarian and System Hungarian. The former was is "extremely valuable" while the latter is from "the dark side.")

The Wikipedia page lists other "notable opinions" both for and against.

Some people say it's useful in untyped languages. Others say it Hungarian Notation just gets in the way. Is there any research to back up any of these opinions, or are variable naming schemes yet another unexplored field?

Does TDD make people more productive?

I'm picking on TDD, but this section can be applied to many other topics.

In any TDD debate you'll hear from people who find it useful, and those who don't. You'll hear about people who tried TDD but didn't find it useful, and you'll hear from others who want to help the first group do TDD correctly. And you'll hear from people who tried git and found it confusing ... though they often move to other version control systems instead.

Look at the old Hungarian discussions and you'll see the same patterns, including people that tried it, liked it, won't move away, and believe that others just don't understand Hungarian correctly.

It looks like the effectiveness of TDD has had many more studies then the effectiveness of either version control systems or Hungarian Notation, so let's use that as the reference. Is the difference in effectiveness between using PEP-8 style names and Apps Hungarian more or less than the difference between TDD and coverage-based testing? Is the difference in effectiveness between using version control instead of manual backups more or less than the difference between TDD and test-last?

And more importantly, are the answers to those questions opinions based on experience or are they backed by evidence? Can we use these experiments to calibrate our understanding of what software engineering researchers can identify?

Feedback

Do you know of any research which tests the effectiveness of version control systems over other approaches? What about of App Hungarian over other approaches? Perhaps you have a "strong opinion,", "loud voice," or have had a "couple of pints of beer" and want to leave a comment?

I sent the seed of this essay to Greg, and he posted it on "It will never work in theory." I think that's the best place to continue this dicussion, so I hope to see you there.

I'll end with a quote from Peter Medawar's "Advice to a Young Scientist":

I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not. The importance of the strength of our conviction is only to provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out of the hypothesis will stand up to critical evaluation.

Postscript

The above essay places the entire burden on software engineering researchers to do new experiments. I don't mean for things to be so one sided. This was also meant for software practicioners.

Software practioners claim a lot of things. Some, like version control systems make sense. Hungarian notation, not so much. I don't think TDD makes much sense, and the research seems to back me up.

If you are software practioner then take that final quote from Medawar to heart. You can make claims about your method X or approach Y, but in the back of your head, remember that I'll be asking you "how do you know that your approach is any better at improving productivity than switching to Apps Hungarian?" You won't be able to answer that question ... unless X or Y is "Apps Hungarian," of course.

At best you'll point to success cases, and then I'll point to the success of Microsoft Word and Excel in the 1990s, and to shops like Fog Creek.

Read: Is TDD better than Apps Hungarian?

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