Software Best Practices

I have rules. You have rules. Teams have rules. Rules trip up both individuals and teams causing unintended consequences. We learn rules about such things as what we must do, what we can question, and what we can say. A rule dictates behavior. But when transformed into a guide, it enables you to choose...

Workshop When you are a member of team, what hopes do you have for productivity? My hope is for synergy, by which I mean team productivity that is clearly superior to what the sum of the individual members’ productivity might have been working separately. Productive teamwork — that’s...

My last couple of posts on productivity variations among programmers and the Chief Programmer Team model gave rise to some discussion about hazards of measuring software productivity at the individual programmer level. Software engineering studies normally measure productivity in terms of time to complete...

One spinoff from the 10x difference in programmer productivity was the Chief Programmer Team structure. The idea of the chief-programmer team was originally developed at IBM during the late 1960s (Baker 1972, Baker and Mills 1973). It was popularized by Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man-Month (Brooks 1975...

Some blog readers have asked for more background on where the "10x" name of this blog cam from. The gist of the name is that researchers have found 10-fold differences in productivity and quality between different programmers with the same levels of experience and also between different teams...

Glass leverages Fact 6 on this one. Because developers don't work through the learning curve of new tools they don't see the productivity gains and quick using the tool. Often this is because so many projects are schedule driven and its common for people in a stressful situation to revert back...

This is one of the central themes of the book. Awareness of these facts & fallacies enables one to think critically about the latest doodad and make a sound business decision. Three observations come to mind. - Decision making in academia and industry is different. - Software is still more craft...

Hype is the plague on the house of software. Most software tool and technique improvements account for about 5 to 35 percent increase in productivity and quality. But at one time or another, most of those same improvements have been claimed by someone to have "order of magnitude" benefits.

Earl, That’s a good distinction. I’ve worked in several teams that benefited from sitting close together in an arrangement to facilitate communication. I’ve also been in quiet office space and been productive there too. I agree with this fact but I’ll play devil’s advocate. I’ve worked in some small...

Steve, Your list of criteria has even wider application. [quote user="Steve Tockey"] All great designers seem to have: *) A large set of standard patterns--in other words, many previously-solved approaches to problems *) They've lived through failed projects, but more importantly they had...