We have heard this kind of claim a lot. Does anyone have numbers or real measurements for differnet kinds of programmers? What percent of time is spent by various classes of programmers in front of a screen doing coding/debugging versus other tasks?
Here are some real references. First, the classic: Barry Boehm, Software Engineering Economics, Prentice Hall, 1981. And yes, he has some hard data he used for his claims.
His two more recent books
Software Cost Estimation with COCOMO II, Prentice Hall, with C. Abts, A.W. Brown, S. Chulani, B.K. Clark, E. Horowitz, R. Madachy, D. Reifer, and B. Steece, 2000
Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed, with R. Turner, Addison Wesley, 2004. are also relevant, and contain some more data.
The November/December 2003 special issue of IEEE Software contains some good articles, in particular:
- Caper Jones, "Variations in software development practices" clearly shows that for larger projects, the work distribution amongst the team involves way more than programming. [Programmers may still 'just' program, but the 'team' involves a lot of non-programming people/activities]. Based on real data.
- M. Mancuso & al, "Software Development Worldwide: State of the Practice" has a decent sized survey, showing a definite correlation between software practices and defects (but that different 'good' practices can generate good software)
See also
Passing, U. Shepperd, M.J. "An Experiment on Software Project Size and Effort Estimation", Proc. of 2nd ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE 2003), Rome, IEEE Computer Society, 2003.
There is a wealth of data available through the reports on http://dec.bournemouth.ac.uk/ESERG/TechnicalReports.html (and a huge explosion by following the reference chains).
Jacques
---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([email protected]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
