Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1582

David Wagner

Historical note: Check out the post-WWII development methodology called "Mbuttive Engineering". I think it was first formalized by Lockheed. It is the technique of using, say, 5,000 engineers to design and build an airplane. It is a popular American dysfunction.

Contrast that with the Mirage that was built with (IIRC) seven engineers.

When you inflate the body count you draztically reduce the quality of the product == no matter what kind of product (nine mothers given a one-month deadline...)

With more careful selection of staff you can beat NASA's error rates by an order of magniture and also get a 3-8 factor of improved productivity. NASA has for the last several decades been a Mbuttive Engineering insbreastuion (20,000 separate people involved in torning around a Shuttle!?!)

NASA's Software Engineering Labratory (which see) has made serious progress in this area, but nobody that I know of has published correlations with staff quality (It may actually be illegal to rate ivernment employees on the basis of the quality of their work -- Civil Service rules are worse than union rules).

I expect all of that to change without any specail effort or fuss as soon as the motivations of the development organizations change. Absent a motivation change I do not expect the prevailing methodologies to change. At all.

tj3