Busting the Myths of Programmer Productivity
December 2020 • Webinar
William Nichols
Are the great programmers really 10 times faster than the rest? What does this difference in productivity even mean?
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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
William Nichols
William “Bill” Nichols joined the SEI in 2006 as a senior member of the technical staff and served as a PSP instructor and TSP coach with the Team Software Process team. Prior to joining the SEI, Nichols ...
William “Bill” Nichols joined the SEI in 2006 as a senior member of the technical staff and served as a PSP instructor and TSP coach with the Team Software Process team. Prior to joining the SEI, Nichols led a software development team at the Bettis Laboratory near Pittsburgh, where he had been developing and maintaining nuclear engineering and scientific software for 14 years. Publication topics include the interaction patterns on software development teams, design and performance of a physics data acquisition system, analysis and results from a particle physics experiment, and algorithms development for use in neutron diffusion programs, effectiveness of software security tools, and software quality economics. Nichols has a doctorate in physics from Carnegie Mellon University.