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The Approximate Number System and software estimating

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

The ability to perform simple numeric operations can improve the fitness of a creature (e.g., being able to select which branch contains the most fruit), increasing the likelihood of it having offspring. Studies have found that a wide variety of creatures have a brain subsystem known as the Approximate Number System (ANS).

A study by Mechner rewarded rats with food, if they pressed a lever N times (with N taking one of the values 4, 8, 12 or 16), followed by pressing a second lever. The plot below shows the number of lever presses made before pressing the second lever, for a given required N; it suggests that the subject rat is making use of an approximate number system (code+data):

Daily article counts for blog.

Humans have a second system for representing numbers, which is capable of exact representation, it is language. The Number Sense by Stanislas Dehaene was on my list of Christmas books for 2011.

One method used to study the interface between the two language systems, available to humans, involves subjects estimating the number of dots in a briefly presented image. While reading about one such study, I noticed that some of the plots showed patterns similar to the patterns seen in plots of software estimate/actual data. I emailed the lead author, Véronique Izard, who kindly sent me a copy of the experimental data.

The patterns I was hoping to see are those invariably seen in software effort estimation data, e.g., a power law relationship between actual/estimate, consistent over/under estimation by individuals, and frequent use of round numbers.

Psychologists reading this post may be under the impression that estimating the time taken to implement some functionality, in software, is a relatively accurate process. In practice, for short tasks (i.e., under a day or two) the time needed to form a more accurate estimate makes a good-enough estimate a cost-effective option.

This Izard and Dehaene study involved two experiments. In the first experiment, an image containing between 1 and 100 dots was flashed on the screen for 100ms, and subjects then had to type the estimated number of dots. Each of the six subjects participated in five sessions of 600 trials, with each session lasting about one hour; every number of dots between 1 and 100 was seen 30 times by each subject (for one subject the data contains 1,783 responses, other subjects gave 3,000 responses). Subjects were free to type any value as their estimate.

These kinds of studies have consistently found that subject accuracy is very poor (hardly surprising, given that subjects are not provided with any feedback to help calibrate their estimates). But since researchers are interested in patterns that might be present in the errors, very low accuracy is not an issue.

The plot below shows stimulus (number of dots shown) against subject response, with green line showing Response==Stimulus, and red line a fitted regression model having the form Response=1.7*Stimulus^{0.7} (which explains just over 70% of the variance; code+data):

Response given for given number of stimulus dots, with fitted regression model.

Just like software estimates, there is a good fit to a power law, and the only difference in accuracy performance is that software estimates tend not to be so skewed towards underestimating (i.e., there are a lot more low accuracy overestimates).

Adding subjectID to the model gives: Response=1.8*Stimulus^{0.7}*SubjectID, with SubjectID varying between 0.65 and 1.57; more than a factor of two difference between subjects (this model explains just under 90% of the variance). This is a smaller range than the software estimation data, but with only six subjects there was less chance of a wider variation (code+data).

The software estimation data finds shows that accuracy does not improve with practice. The experimental subjects were not given any feedback, and would not be expected to improve, but does the strain of answering so many questions cause them to get worse? Adding trial number to the model suggests a 12% increase in underestimation, over 600 trials. However, adding an interaction with SubjectID shows that the performance of two subjects remains unchanged, while two subjects experience a 23% increase in underestimation.

The plot below shows the number of times each response was given, combining all subjects, with commonly given responses in red (code+data):

Number of occurrences of response values, over all subjects.

The commonly occurring values that appear in software estimation data are structured as fractions of units of time, e.g., 0.5 hours, or 1 hour or 1 day (appearing in the data as 7 hours). The only structure available to experimental subjects was subdivisions of powers of 10 (i.e., 10 and 100).

Analysing the responses by subject shows that each subject had their own set of preferred round numbers.

To summarize: The results from an experiment investigating the interface between the two human number systems contains three patterns seen in software estimation data, i.e., power law relationship between actual and estimate, individual differences in over/underestimating, and extensive use of round numbers.

Izard’s second experiment limited response values to prespecified values (i.e., one to 10 and multiples of 10), and gave a calibration example after each block of 46 trials. The calibration example improved performance, and the use of round numbers as prespecified response values had the effect of removing spikes from the response counts (which were relatively smooth; code+data)).

We now have circumstantial evidence that software developers are using the Approximate Number System when making software estimates. We will have to wait for brain images from a developer in an MRI scanner, while estimating a software task, to obtain more concrete proof that the ANS is involved in the process. That is, are the areas of the brain thought to be involved in the ANS (e.g., the intraparietal sulcus) active during software estimation?

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What is known about software effort estimation in 2021

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

What do we know about software effort estimation, based on evidence?

The few publicly available datasets (e.g., SiP, CESAW, and Renzo) involve (mostly) individuals estimating short duration tasks (i.e., rarely more than a few hours). There are other tiny datasets, which are mostly used to do fake research. The patterns found across these datasets include:

  • developers often use round-numbers,
  • the equation: Actual approx K*Estimate^{0.9pm 0.05}, where K is a constant that varies between projects, often explains around 50% of the variance present in the data. This equation shows that developers under-estimate short tasks and over-estimate long tasks. The exponent, 0.9pm 0.05, applies across most projects in the data,
  • individuals tend to either consistently over or under estimate,
  • developer estimation accuracy does not change with practice. Possible reasons for this include: variability in the world prevents more accurate estimates, developers choose to spend their learning resources on other topics.

Does social loafing have an impact on actual effort? The data needed to answer this question is currently not available (the available data mostly involves people working on their own).

When working on a task, do developers follow Parkinson’s law or do they strive to meet targets?

The following plot suggests that one or the other, or both are true (data):

left: Number of tasks taking a given amount of actual time, when they were estimated to take 30, 60 or 120 minutes; right: Number of tasks estimated to take a given amount of time, when they actually took 30, 60 or 120 minutes

On the left: Each colored lines shows the number of tasks having a given actual implementation time, when they were estimated to take 30, 60 or 120 minutes (the right plot reverses the role of estimate/actual). Many of the spikes in the task counts are at round numbers, suggesting that the developer has fixated on a time to finish and is either taking it easy or striving to hit it. The problem is distinguishing them mathematically; suggestions welcome.

None of these patterns of behavior appear to be software specific. They all look like generic human behaviors. I have started emailing researchers working on project analytics in other domains, asking for data (no luck so far).

Other patterns may be present for many projects in the existing data, we have to wait for somebody to ask the right question (if one exists).

It is also possible that the existing data has some unusual characteristics that don’t apply to most projects. We won’t know until data on many more projects becomes available.

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Effort estimation’s inaccurate past and the way forward

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Almost since people started building software systems, effort estimation has been a hot topic for researchers.

Effort estimation models are necessarily driven by the available data (the Putnam model is one of few whose theory is based on more than arm waving). General information about source code can often be obtained (e.g., size in lines of code), and before package software and open source, software with roughly the same functionality was being implemented in lots of organizations.

Estimation models based on source code characteristics proliferated, e.g., COCOMO. What these models overlooked was human variability in implementing the same functionality (a standard deviation that is 25% of the actual size is going to introduce a lot of uncertainty into any effort estimate), along with the more obvious assumption that effort was closely tied to source code characteristics.

The advent of high-tech clueless button pushing machine learning created a resurgence of new effort estimation models; actually they are estimation adjustment models, because they require an initial estimate as one of the input variables. Creating a machine learned model requires a list of estimated/actual values, along with any other available information, to build a mapping function.

The sparseness of the data to learn from (at most a few hundred observations of half-a-dozen measured variables, and usually less) has not prevented a stream of puffed-up publications making all kinds of unfounded claims.

Until a few years ago the available public estimation data did not include any information about who made the estimate. Once estimation data contained the information needed to distinguish the different people making estimates, the uncertainty introduced by human variability was revealed (some consistently underestimating, others consistently overestimating, with 25% difference between two estimators being common, and a factor of two difference between some pairs of estimators).

How much accuracy is it realistic to expect with effort estimates?

At the moment we don’t have enough information on the software development process to be able to create a realistic model; without a realistic model of the development process, it’s a waste of time complaining about the availability of information to feed into a model.

I think a project simulation model is the only technique capable of creating a good enough model for use in industry; something like Abdel-Hamid’s tour de force PhD thesis (he also ignores my emails).

We are still in the early stages of finding out the components that need to be fitted together to build a model of software development, e.g., round numbers.

Even if all attempts to build such a model fail, there will be payback from a better understanding of the development process.

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for-loop usage at different nesting levels

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

When reading code, starting at the first line of a function/method, the probability of the next statement read being a for-loop is around 1.5% (at least in C, I don’t have decent data on other languages). Let’s say you have been reading the code a line at a time, and you are now reading lines nested within various if/while/for statements, you are at nesting depth d. What is the probability of the statement on the next line being a for-loop?

Does the probability of encountering a for-loop remain unchanged with nesting depth (i.e., developer habits are not affected by nesting depth), or does it decrease (aren’t developers supposed to using functions/methods rather than nesting; I have never heard anybody suggest that it increases)?

If you think the for-loop use probability is not affected by nesting depth, you are going to argue for the plot on the left (below, showing number of loops appearing in C source at various nesting depths), with the regression model fitting really well after 3-levels of nesting. If you think the probability decreases with nesting depth, you are likely to argue for the plot on the right, with the model fitting really well down to around 10-levels of nesting (code+data).

Number of C source lines containing a given number of characters.

Both plots use the same data, but different scales are used for the x-axis.

If probability of use is independent of nesting depth, an exponential equation should fit the data (i.e., the left plot), decreasing probability is supported by a power-law (i.e, the right plot; plus other forms of equation, but let’s keep things simple).

The two cases are very wrong over different ranges of the data. What is your explanation for reality failing to follow your beliefs in for-loop occurrence probability?

Is the mismatch between belief and reality caused by the small size of the data set (a few million lines were measured, which was once considered to be a lot), or perhaps your beliefs are based on other languages which will behave as claimed (appropriate measurements on other languages most welcome).

The nesting depth dependent use probability plot shows a sudden change in the rate of decrease in for-loop probability; perhaps this is caused by the maximum number of characters that can appear on a typical editor line (within a window). The left plot (below) shows the number of lines (of C source) containing a given number of characters; the right plot counts tokens per line and the length effect is much less pronounced (perhaps developers use shorter identifiers in nested code). Note: different scales used for the x-axis (code+data).

Number of lines containing a given number of C tokens.

I don’t have any believable ideas for why the exponential fit only works if the first few nesting depths are ignored. What could be so special about early nesting depths?

What about fitting the data with other equations?

A bi-exponential springs to mind, with one exponential driven by application requirements and the other by algorithm selection; but reality is not on-board with this idea.

Ideas, suggestions, and data for other languages, most welcome.