Craftsmanship, professionalism and TDD

Uncle Bob just released this really interesting article.

I loved the humble tone, and it helped in conveying the message. Indeed our industry is completely amateur, with millions of euros/dollars wasted on abandoned projects.

And TDD might be part of the solution, preventing regressions, and promoting a better architecture. It will emphasise the central role and give more responsibility to the developer.

But the product owners, and all the layers of managers we add in the middle, are also part of the problem. When the problem is not well defined, when no one is willing to be in charge and make decisions, when it becomes political, and diverging visions are pushed into a single software, there's nothing a software engineer can do, and computer science is too easy to blame.

Indeed computer science is just the science of writing programs. What we need is computer applied science, which "applies existing scientific knowledge to develop more practical applications" wikipedia.

The developer, but also the ecosystem around, need to professionalize.