The software profession has a problem, widely recognized but which nobody seems willing to do anything about. You can think of this problem as a variant of the well known "telephone game", where some trivial rumor is repeated from one person to the next until it has become distorted beyond recognition and blown up out of all proportion.
Unfortunately, the objects of this telephone game are generally considered cornerstone truths of the discipline, to the point that their acceptance now seems to hinder further progress.
In this short ebook, we will take a look at some of those "ground truths": the claimed 10x variation in productivity between developers; the "software crisis"; the cost-of-change curve; the "cone of uncertainty"; and more. We'll hone our scholarship skills by looking up the original source for these ideas and taking a deep dive in the history of their development. We'll assess the real weight of the evidence behind these ideas.
And we'll confront the scary prospect of moving the state of the art forward in a discipline that has had the ground kicked from under it.
Author(s): Laurent Bossavit
Edition: 1
Publisher: Leanpub
Year: 2012
Language: English
Pages: 183
Preface
Chapter 1: Software Engineering’s telephone game
How we got there
Surface plausibility
Leprechaun spotting
What you can do
Chapter 2: The Cone of Uncertainty
How to feel foolish in front of a class
Making sense of the picture
Getting to the facts
The telephone game in action
Controversy
What to make of all this?
Chapter 3: Why you should care about empirical results
The perils of empirical research
Discipline envy
Science and reality
Where to go from here
Chapter 4: The messy workings of scientific discourse
Modalities
Citation as modality
The construction of facts
Chapter 5: The hunt for the 10x files
Why is this important? Isn’t it obvious?
The impressive list of references
The original study and the 10x claim
Harshly criticized
The 10x files
Good study, bad study
The wild goose chase
Chapter 6: The variable programmer
Getting just the results you want
Within-subject variability
Rocket science: the NASA data
Needle in a haystack
The COCOMO haystacks
Environmental effects
Summing up
Interlude: How To Lie
Chapter 7: Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Waterfall?
The standard story
Alternate endings
Just the facts
No paper is an island
Late bloomer
Birth of a myth
Chapter 8: Software’s perpetual crisis
Chapter 9: A Leprechaun hunting tutorial
Chapter 10: The cost of defects: an illustrated history
Origins
First amendments
Where’s the data?
Metamorphoses
Changing the topic altogether
Reading curves
Theory-laden diagrams
Boehm’s assent
Chapter 11: Rocket science and Flaubert math
Flaubert and the math of ROI
NASA IV&V’s math
How old is the captain?
Eighy-three! For some value of eighty-three.
Chapter 12: For some value of 56
Where bugs come from
Sample size of one
Poor requirements
A software triumph
Chapter 13: The cost of bad research
Uncritical thinking
Extraordinarily suspect claims
Terms of inquiry
Research standards
Chapter 14: Raising the bar
Two modest proposals for publications on software development
Will you take the pledge?
Chapter 15: A new model of inquiry
The Ouroboros effect: circular causation
From Requirements To Negotiation
The cliffhanger
Appendix A: bibliographical analysis of the 10x files
Questions of indirection
Summary results
The quest for primary sources
A better list: primary sources with empirical evidence
Appendix B: bibliographical analysis for the “defect-cost-increase curve”
The older references
The newer references
Appendix C - Conceptions and invention of waterfall
Invention of waterfall
Conceptions of waterfall (articles between 1970 and 1989)
