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 thi

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.