Software Development Observed

This describes developer behaviour in the world’s most successful (profitable) software development company and it’s completely familiar. ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2005-140.pdfAsta credca e cunoscut de toti :))))))):“The second recourse for investigating the rationale behind code is in fact the social network. Ifthe developer thinks that someone within his team might be able to provide the neededinformation (or the name of the person who might), he will walk down the hall to talk with theteammate. Unplanned, face-to-face meetings happen frequently with teammates, averaging 8.4 inthe prior week, and much less frequently with non-teammates, averaging 2.6. Email is usedinstead of face-to-face meetings when the issue is low priority, involves multiple people, orcrosses the team moat, averaging 16.1 sent to teammates in the prior week and 5.9 to nonteammates.(Note that these data show that communication within the team is much morecommon than communication across teams, indicating that the culture of informal communicationworks well and that the team boundaries are typically drawn in the right places.) Once the developer has the desired information, he returns to his office, applies the newfoundinformation, and gets on with his work. This information is precious: it is demonstrably useful,demonstrably hard to ascertain from the code, and was obtained at a high cost. Yet it isexceedingly rare for the developer to write this morsel down anywhere. The next person whoencounters the same information need has to go through the same laborious discovery process.There are plenty of reasons that a developer would choose to not record the information – theoverhead of checking the code out, editing it, and checking it back in (possibly triggering checkinreview processes, merge conflicts, test suite runs, etc.) is enough to dissuade the developerfrom recording the information as a comment in the code. But the loss of this precious knowledgeis, from an organizational perspective, a crying shame.”