> The cubicle? Anti-Productivity Pods: Cubicles as Dilbert so astutely noted.
"For my money the most important work on software productivity in the last 20 years is DeMarco and Lister's Peopleware (1987 Dorset House Publishing, NY NY). For a decade the authors conducted coding wars at a number of different companies, pitting teams against each other on a standard set of software problems. The results showed that, using any measure of performance (speed, defects, etc.) the average of those in the 1st quartile outperformed the average in the 4th quartile by a factor of 2.6. Surprisingly, none of the factors you'd expect to matter correlated to the best and worst performers. Even experience mattered little, as long as the programmers had been working for at least 6 months. They did find a very strong correlation between the office environment and team performance. Needless interruptions yielded poor performance. The best teams had private (read "quiet") offices and phones with "off" switches. Their study suggests that quiet time saves vast amounts of money. Think about this. The almost minor tweak of getting some quiet time can, according to their data, multiply your productivity by 260%! That's an astonishing result. For the same salary your boss pays you now, he'd get essentially 2.6 of you." -- Jack Ganssle in The Embedded Muse #25. You can find related comments at http://www.softwaresafety.net . _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
