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Whenever I’m aware that I’m making an interpretation, I have another choice: I can allow myself to know that more than one interpretation is possible. A good check on premature interpretation is the Rule of Three Interpretations:
If I can’t think of at least three different interpretations of what I received, I haven’t thought enough about [...]

Culture makes its presence known through patterns that persist over time. These patterns are not always consciously generated as patterns.
The same is true for software cultures. Their patterns can be seen in many ways. Before embarking on a program of detailed measurements, seek large-scale cultural measurements to guide your search. The conventional way of measuring [...]

The Dickey paper helpfully reproduces a table of the key data from the Sackman experiment. (I haven’t been able to find the original version of the Sackman paper yet, so I haven’t been able to verify the data, but I’ll assume for now that IEEE Transactions verified it when they published Dickey’s paper!)
I’ve eliminated the [...]

In the same issue as the Dickey paper there was another small follow-up article by Bill Curtis attempting to put forward other data in support of the high degree of variability, in light of the problems with the data from Sackman.
The approach this time was simpler, although still aimed at debugging: 27 programmers were given [...]

In July 1981, thirteen and a half years after the Sackman paper, Proceedings of the IEEE published a little-known response from Thomas Dickey.
In it, he points out that the now oft-quoted 28:1 productivity difference is an inaccurate reading of the data. The CACM article usually referenced was only a summary of the full paper, excluding [...]

I spent a very productive morning at the library in search of the original articles on “order of magnitude productivity differences”.
The original paper that everyone seems to point back to, either directly, or by pointing to other references that in turn point this one, recursively, is this article by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant in CACM [...]

Steering (Pattern 3) cultures are distinguished by their ability to keep the product open to view. What distinguishes Anticipating
(Pattern 4) organizations is the ability to keep the process
open. In other words, Anticipating managers are not just steering the
quality of each product, they are steering the quality of all products
at the same time by steering the [...]

When I read about this at diveintomark, my original parsing convinced me that it was about how to deal with unruly mailing lists about CSS (the CSS list I’m on is much too high volume for me to actually read much). Or at least something akin to MJD’s Mailing List Judo.
It actually turns out [...]

I also found an interesting recent article by Barry Boehm on “Managing Software Productivity and Reuse” [pdf], that details the results of an extensive analysis conducted with the DOD to discover savings over a business-as-normal approach.
In this study, they discovered that you could achieve an 8% improvement through “working harder”, a 17% improvement through “working [...]

I’ve been trying to find more information on the “factor of 10″ productivity differences, between either teams or individuals, frequently cited, but most of the primary articles don’t seem to be available on-line. A trip to the library is probably in order again early next week.
I did come across this study from 1995, however, which [...]

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