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Busting the Myths of Programmer Productivity

Webcast
Are the great programmers really 10 times faster than the rest? What does this difference in productivity even mean?
Publisher

Software Engineering Institute

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Abstract

Are the great programmers really 10 times faster than the rest? What does this difference in productivity even mean? What productivity distribution should we expect between professionals? How can we use this knowledge? In this webcast, we make the most of a large set of programmer training data using repeated measures to explore these questions.

What attendees will learn:

  • For routine tasks, professional programmers have a narrower range of productivity than we first supposed, but almost half of the variation in individual productivity is noise, making programmer rankings suspect.
  • Rather than finding the “fastest” programmers, we should find competent people and give them the training and environment they need to succeed.

About the Speaker

Headshot of Bill Nichols.

Bill Nichols

William "Bill" Nichols joined the SEI in 2006 as a senior member of the technical staff and served as a Personal Software Process (PSP) instructor and Team Software Process (TSP) coach. Before joining the SEI, Nichols led a software-development team at the Bettis Laboratory near Pittsburgh, where he had been …

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