Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Thu, 06 Nov 2003

Links

I find the following quote (from Laurent Bossavit, part of a longer post) pretty evocative, though I can't quite say yet what it evokes.

Or consider a related model, "Baumol's cost disease": industries where productivity remains constant will have increasing costs, because the industries where rising productivity is keeping costs down can raise wages to attract workers. To keep costs down, flat-productivity industries may have to lower quality.

Perhaps this is even directly applicable to software development. Consider the productivity of programming compared to that of testing/debugging (the old-fashioned kind). Today it is possible to write code in one hour that does a lot more than one hour's worth of coding thirty years ago: there's huge amounts of function in the OS, in the core class libraries, etc. But the productivity of testing remains constant: there's only so much complexity you can poke and prod given one hour of debugging. So the trend would be toward testing becoming ever more costly compared to development, leading to less testing being done in order to keep costs down, leading to more quality problems.

Blogs on testing from Microsoft (via Tim van Tongeren): Sara Ford, Josh Ledgard, and Joe Bork.

## Posted at 07:43 in category /misc [permalink] [top]