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Honest questionn--did the productivity study where the oft-quoted 10x number comes from count lines of code as the productivity measure? If so, lines of code av

by ericb 17y ago

Honest questionn--did the productivity study where the oft-quoted 10x number comes from count lines of code as the productivity measure? If so, lines of code avoided would move a developer into the "less productive" bucket. Anyone have a link to a source for this number?

Zev 17y ago
The number is from The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks, based on his experiences when developing IBM's OS/360. Beyond that, I can't really answer the rest of your questions; I haven't managed to sit down and read it yet.
smokinn 17y ago
Dr. Greg Wilson (editor of the Beautiful Code book that spawned Beautiful Architecture later) is working on a new book that talks about exactly this kind of thing. http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/archives/2910.html http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/archives/2910.html Basically, he says that professional understanding of software is still in the lore stage where we gossip about what works and doesn't rather than empirical studies based on evidence. About this specific number though (the programmers are X times more productive) that's often repeated: To date, these studies have mostly been confined to academia. Most professional developers are vaguely aware of some of the results, but often get the details wrong. For example, hundreds of books, blog posts, and presentations claim that the best programmers are forty times better than the worst—or fifteen, or a hundred, or some other number. Almost none of the people repeating that claim realize that it originally came from a very small study (twelve people) run for a very short time (one afternoon) in an era of batch processing and punch cards.
- dgabriel 17y ago
  This is a great piece of information, thanks. I always wonder at the shifting X, and am often perplexed that programmers who will take almost NOTHING for granted accept this as gospel truth without any corroborating sources.
- btilly 17y ago
  I don't realize his "fact" for the simple reason that he is wrong. For example I often quote a 10x figure and cite Peopleware as a source. They draw their data from measurements taken of hundreds of different programmers working at different companies in different languages in the mid 1980s. Which is a lot more solid than the punchcard study he cites which I have honestly never heard of.
martincmartin 17y ago
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9xmn8/what_we_actually_know_about_software_development/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9xmn8/what_we_a...

by ericb 17y ago

Zev 17y ago

The number is from The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks, based on his experiences when developing IBM's OS/360. Beyond that, I can't really answer the rest of your questions; I haven't managed to sit down and read it yet.

smokinn 17y ago

Dr. Greg Wilson (editor of the Beautiful Code book that spawned Beautiful Architecture later) is working on a new book that talks about exactly this kind of thing. http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/archives/2910.html http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/archives/2910.html Basically, he says that professional understanding of software is still in the lore stage where we gossip about what works and doesn't rather than empirical studies based on evidence. About this specific number though (the programmers are X times more productive) that's often repeated: To date, these studies have mostly been confined to academia. Most professional developers are vaguely aware of some of the results, but often get the details wrong. For example, hundreds of books, blog posts, and presentations claim that the best programmers are forty times better than the worst—or fifteen, or a hundred, or some other number. Almost none of the people repeating that claim realize that it originally came from a very small study (twelve people) run for a very short time (one afternoon) in an era of batch processing and punch cards.

dgabriel 17y ago
This is a great piece of information, thanks. I always wonder at the shifting X, and am often perplexed that programmers who will take almost NOTHING for granted accept this as gospel truth without any corroborating sources.
btilly 17y ago
I don't realize his "fact" for the simple reason that he is wrong. For example I often quote a 10x figure and cite Peopleware as a source. They draw their data from measurements taken of hundreds of different programmers working at different companies in different languages in the mid 1980s. Which is a lot more solid than the punchcard study he cites which I have honestly never heard of.

martincmartin 17y ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9xmn8/what_we_actually_know_about_software_development/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9xmn8/what_we_a...