In light of the recent conversations about the adoption of developer testing on the junit list and Artima, this Turing Award lecture by Robert Floyd seems particularly appropriate. I thought others might enjoy it. There's a particularly valuable quote where he is quoting Thomas Kuhn's, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."

"Again from Kuhn:

"The older schools gradually disappear. In part their disappearance is caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. But there are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work."

In computing, there is no mechanism for reading such men out of the profession. Isuspect they mainly become managers of software development. "

I suspect a large number of the adoption problems for developer testing are in organizations where the old boy at the helm is clinging to an outmoded paradigm of software development. Perhaps those guys would listen to Floyd -- (Robert, not Pink.)

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