The Leprechauns of Software Engineering Front Cover

The Leprechauns of Software Engineering

  • Length: 196 pages
  • Edition: 1
  • Publisher:
  • Publication Date: 2015-06-28
  • ISBN-10: 2954745509
  • ISBN-13: 9782954745503
  • Sales Rank: #2826089 (See Top 100 Books)
Description

The software profession has a problem, widely recognized but which nobody seems willing to do anything about; a variant of the well known “telephone game”, where some trivial rumor is repeated from one person to the next until it has become distorted beyond recognition and blown up out of all proportion. Unfortunately, the objects of this telephone game are generally considered cornerstone truths of the discipline, to the point that their acceptance now seems to hinder further progress. This book takes a look at some of those “ground truths”: the claimed 10x variation in productivity between developers; the “software crisis”; the cost-of-change curve; the “cone of uncertainty”; and more. It assesses the real weight of the evidence behind these ideas – and confronts the scary prospect of moving the state of the art forward in a discipline that has had the ground kicked from under it.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Software Engineering’s telephone game
Chapter 2: The Cone of Uncertainty
Chapter 3: Why you should care about empirical results
Chapter 4: The messy workings of scientific discourse
Chapter 5: The hunt for the 10x files
Chapter 6: The variable programmer
Interlude: How To Lie
Chapter 7: Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Waterfall?
Chapter 8: Software’s perpetual crisis
Chapter 9: A Leprechaun hunting tutorial
Chapter 10: The cost of defects: an illustrated history
Chapter 11: Rocket science and Flaubert math
Chapter 12: For some value of 56
Chapter 13: The cost of bad research
Chapter 14: Raising the bar
Chapter 15: A new model of inquiry
Appendix A: bibliographical analysis of the 10x files
Appendix B: bibliographical analysis for the “defect-cost-increase curve”
Appendix C: Conceptions and invention of waterfall

To access the link, solve the captcha.
Subscribe