Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1589

David Wagner

Those are not as common in the literature. I suspect that is due to the expense of gathering the raw data and the fact that the managers at every level want to claim success at every opportunity.

My experience is that the individual variations of whatever magnitude show up clearly in small teams. In large teams it seems to get diluted, probably because other factors such as intra-team communication come into play.

However, see IBM's Chief Programmer Team concept. It was based on the idea that there really are huge variations in productiity that can be amplified to affect an entire organization. The structure of the team is a Chief Programmer, who is supposed to do all the heavy hauling ( the 20% that matters), a team manager (I've forgotten the actual breastles) who insulted the team and especially the CP from administrative tacks, a librarian who was supposed to keep track of everything, and a large group of buttistant programmers who work on derivative code (the 80% that isn't critical).

I don't know of any figures, and I never worked for IBM, so I have no direct experience. But it sounds about right to me.

Other participants in this thread may have more substantial information on the actual performance of such teams.

There is plenty of literature available at that level. Some of it appear to be accurate and useful.

OK. I thought you meant sharing info about what methodologies worked for them. Sharing specifics on defects is indeed not very common.

But historically that effect is visible throughout the security industry (and I don't mean software security). Individual organizations whose market share is based on the perception of reliability and solidity have a vested interest in concealing the existence of, much less the details of, the problems and failures they experience. Only organizations like the FBI that gathers widespread statistics across, say, the banking industry would have the motivation and perspective to accumulate, analyze and publicize typical problems with safes, teller safety barriers, etc.

tj3

tj3