Career progression: an invisible issue in software development

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Career progression is an important issue in the development of some software systems, but its impact is rarely discussed, let along researched. A common consequence of career progression is that a project looses a member of staff, e.g., they move to work on a different project, or leave the company. Hiring staff and promoting staff are related neglected research areas.

Understanding the initial and ongoing development of non-trivial software systems requires an understanding of the career progression, and expectations of progression, of the people working on the system.

Effectively working on a software system requires some amount of knowledge of how it operates, or is intended to operate. The loss of a person with working knowledge of a system reduces the rate at which a project can be further developed. It takes time to find a suitable replacement, and for that person’s knowledge of the behavior of the existing system to reach a workable level.

We know that most software is short-lived, but know almost nothing about the involvement-lifetime of those who work on software systems.

There has been some research studying the durations over which people have been involved with individual Open source projects. However, I don’t believe the findings from this research, because I think that non-paid involvement on an Open source project has very different duration and motivation characteristics than a paying job (there are also data cleaning issues around the same person using multiple email addresses, and people working in small groups with one person submitting code).

Detailed employment data, in bulk, has commercial value, and so is rarely freely available. It is possible to scrape data from the adverts of job websites, but this only provides information about the kinds of jobs available, not the people employed.

LinkedIn contains lots of detailed employment history, and the US courts have ruled that it is not illegal to scrape this data. It’s on my list of things to do, and I keep an eye out for others making such data available.

The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth has followed the lives of 10k+ people since 1979 (people were asked to detail their lives in periodic surveys). Using this data, Joseph, Boh, Ang, and Slaughter investigated the job categories within the career paths of 500 people who had worked in a technical IT role. The plot below shows the career paths of people who had spent at least five years working in an IT role (code+data):

The job categories contained within the seven career paths in which people spent at least five years working in a technical IT role.

Employment history provides an upper bound for the time that a person is likely to have worked on a project (being employed to work on an Open source project while, over time, working at multiple companies is an edge case).

A company may have employees simultaneously working on multiple projects, spending a percentage of their time on each. How big a resource impact is the loss of such a person? Were they simply the same kind of cog in multiple projects, or did they play an important synchronization role across projects? Details on all the projects a person worked on would help answer some questions.

Building a software system involves a lot more than writing the code. Technical managers working on high level, broad brush, issues. The project knowledge that technical managers have contributes to ongoing work, and the impact of loosing a technical manager is probably more of a longer term issue than loosing a coding-developer.

There are systems that are developed and maintained by essentially one person over many years. These get written about and celebrated, but are comparatively rare.

One of the more reliable ways of estimating developer productivity is to measure the impact of them leaving a project.

Evaluating estimation performance

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

What is the best way to evaluate the accuracy of an estimation technique, given that the actual values are known?

Estimates are often given as point values, and accuracy scoring functions (for a sequence of estimates) have the form S=1/n sum{i=1}{n}{S(E_i, A_i)}, where n is the number of estimated values, E_i the estimates, and A_i the actual values; smaller S is better.

Commonly used scoring functions include:

  • S(E, A)=(E-A)^2, known as squared error (SE)
  • S(E, A)=delim{|}{E-A}{|}, known as absolute error (AE)
  • S(E, A)=delim{|}{E-A}{|}/A, known as absolute percentage error (APE)
  • S(E, A)=delim{|}{E-A}{|}/E, known as relative error (RE)

APE and RE are special cases of: S(E, A)=delim{|}{1-(A/E)^{beta}}{|}, with beta=-1 and beta=1 respectively.

Let’s compare three techniques for estimating the time needed to implement some tasks, using these four functions.

Assume that the mean time taken to implement previous project tasks is known, E_m. When asked to implement a new task, an optimist might estimate 20% lower than the mean, E_o=E_m*0.8, while a pessimist might estimate 20% higher than the mean, E_p=E_m*1.2. Data shows that the distribution of the number of tasks taking a given amount of time to implement is skewed, looking something like one of the lines in the plot below (code):

Two example distributions of number of tasks taking a given amount of time to implement.

We can simulate task implementation time by randomly drawing values from a distribution having this shape, e.g., zero-truncated Negative binomial or zero-truncated Weibull. The values of E_o and E_p are calculated from the mean, E_m, of the distribution used (see code for details). Below is each estimator’s score for each of the scoring functions (the best performing estimator for each scoring function in bold; 10,000 values were used to reduce small sample effects):

    SE   AE   APE   RE
E_o 2.73 1.29 0.51 0.56
E_m 2.31 1.23 0.39 0.68
E_p 2.70 1.37 0.36 0.86

Surprisingly, the identity of the best performing estimator (i.e., optimist, mean, or pessimist) depends on the scoring function used. What is going on?

The analysis of scoring functions is very new. A 2010 paper by Gneiting showed that it does not make sense to select the scoring function after the estimates have been made (he uses the term forecasts). The scoring function needs to be known in advance, to allow an estimator to tune their responses to minimise the value that will be calculated to evaluate performance.

The mathematics involves Bregman functions (new to me), which provide a measure of distance between two points, where the points are interpreted as probability distributions.

Which, if any, of these scoring functions should be used to evaluate the accuracy of software estimates?

In software estimation, perhaps the two most commonly used scoring functions are APE and RE. If management selects one or the other as the scoring function to rate developer estimation performance, what estimation technique should employees use to deliver the best performance?

Assuming that information is available on the actual time taken to implement previous project tasks, then we can work out the distribution of actual times. Assuming this distribution does not change, we can calculate APE and RE for various estimation techniques; picking the technique that produces the lowest score.

Let’s assume that the distribution of actual times is zero-truncated Negative binomial in one project and zero-truncated Weibull in another (purely for convenience of analysis, reality is likely to be more complicated). Management has chosen either APE or RE as the scoring function, and it is now up to team members to decide the estimation technique they are going to use, with the aim of optimising their estimation performance evaluation.

A developer seeking to minimise the effort invested in estimating could specify the same value for every estimate. Knowing the scoring function (top row) and the distribution of actual implementation times (first column), the minimum effort developer would always give the estimate that is a multiple of the known mean actual times using the multiplier value listed:

                   APE   RE
Negative binomial  1.4   0.5
Weibull            1.2   0.6

For instance, management specifies APE, and previous task/actuals has a Weibull distribution, then always estimate the value 1.2*E_m.

What mean multiplier should Esta Pert, an expert estimator aim for? Esta’s estimates can be modelled by the equation Act*U(0.5, 2.0), i.e., the actual implementation time multiplied by a random value uniformly distributed between 0.5 and 2.0, i.e., Esta is an unbiased estimator. Esta’s table of multipliers is:

                   APE   RE
Negative binomial  1.0   0.7
Weibull            1.0   0.7

A company wanting to win contracts by underbidding the competition could evaluate Esta’s performance using the RE scoring function (to motivate her to estimate low), or they could use APE and multiply her answers by some fraction.

In many cases, developers are biased estimators, i.e., individuals consistently either under or over estimate. How does an implicit bias (i.e., something a person does unconsciously) change the multiplier they should consciously aim for (having analysed their own performance to learn their personal percentage bias)?

The following table shows the impact of particular under and over estimate factors on multipliers:

                 0.8 underestimate bias   1.2 overestimate bias
Score function          APE   RE            APE   RE
Negative binomial       1.3   0.9           0.8   0.6
Weibull                 1.3   0.9           0.8   0.6

Let’s say that one-third of those on a team underestimate, one-third overestimate, and the rest show no bias. What scoring function should a company use to motivate the best overall team performance?

The following table shows that neither of the scoring functions motivate team members to aim for the actual value when the distribution is Negative binomial:

                    APE   RE
Negative binomial   1.1   0.7
Weibull             1.0   0.7

One solution is to create a bespoke scoring function for this case. Both APE and RE are special cases of a more general scoring function (see top). Setting beta=-0.7 in this general form creates a scoring function that produces a multiplication factor of 1 for the Negative binomial case.

NoEstimates panders to mismanagement and developer insecurity

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Why do so few software development teams regularly attempt to estimate the duration of the feature/task/functionality they are going to implement?

Developers hate giving estimates; estimating is very hard and estimates are often inaccurate (at a minimum making the estimator feel uncomfortable and worse when management treats an estimate as a quotation). The future is uncertain and estimating provides guidance.

Managers tell me that the fear of losing good developers dissuades them from requiring teams to make estimates. Developers have told them that they would leave a company that required them to regularly make estimates.

For most of the last 70 years, demand for software developers has outstripped supply. Consequently, management has to pay a lot more attention to the views of software developers than the views of those employed in most other roles (at least if they want to keep the good developers, i.e., those who will have no problem finding another job).

It is not difficult for developers to get a general idea of how their salary, working conditions and practices compares with other developers in their field/geographic region. They know that estimating is not a common practice, and unless the economy is in recession, finding a new job that does not require estimation could be straight forward.

Management’s demands for estimates has led to the creation of various methods for calculating proxy estimate values, none of which using time as the unit of measure, e.g., Function points and Story points. These methods break the requirements down into smaller units, and subcomponents from these units are used to calculate a value, e.g., the Function point calculation includes items such as number of user inputs and outputs, and number of files.

How accurate are these proxy values, compared to time estimates?

As always, software engineering data is sparse. One analysis of 149 projects found that Cost approx FunctionPoints^{0.75}, with the variance being similar to that found when time was estimated. An analysis of Function point calculation data found a high degree of consistency in the calculations made by different people (various Function point organizations have certification schemes that require some degree of proficiency to pass).

Managers don’t seem to be interested in comparing estimated Story points against estimated time, preferring instead to track the rate at which Story points are implemented, e.g., velocity, or burndown. There are tiny amounts of data comparing Story points with time and Function points.

The available evidence suggests a relationship connecting Function points to actual time, and that Function points have similar error bounds to time estimates; the lack of data means that Story points are currently just a source of technobabble and number porn for management power-points (send me Story point data to help change this situation).

Multiple estimates for the same project

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

The first question I ask, whenever somebody tells me that a project was delivered on schedule (or within budget), is which schedule (or budget)?

New schedules are produced for projects that are behind schedule, and costs get re-estimated.

What patterns of behavior might be expected to appear in a project’s reschedulings?

It is to be expected that as a project progresses, subsequent schedules become successively more accurate (in the sense of having a completion date and cost that is closer to the final values). The term cone of uncertainty is sometimes applied as a visual metaphor in project management, with the schedule becoming less uncertain as the project progresses.

The only publicly available software project rescheduling data, from Landmark Graphics, is for completed projects, i.e., cancelled projects are not included (121 completed projects and 882 estimates).

The traditional project management slide has some accuracy metric improving as work on a project approaches completion. The plot below shows the percentage of a project completed when each estimate is made, against the ratio Actual/Estimate; the y-axis uses a log scale so that under/over estimates appear symmetrical (code+data):

Project actual/estimate ratio against percent complete.

The closer a point to the blue line, the more accurate the estimate. The red line shows maximum underestimation, i.e., estimating that the project is complete when there is still more work to be done. A new estimate must be greater than (or equal) to the work already done, i.e., Work_{done} <= Estimate, and Work_{done} = Actual*Percentage_{complete}.

Rearranging, we get: Actual/Estimate <= 1/Percentage_{complete} (plotted in red). The top of the ‘cone’ does not represent managements’ increasing certainty, with project progress, it represents the mathematical upper bound on the possible inaccuracy of an estimate.

In theory there is no limit on overestimating (i.e., points appearing below the blue line), but in practice management are under pressure to deliver as early as possible and to minimise costs. If management believe they have overestimated, they have an incentive to hang onto the time/money allocated (the future is uncertain).

Why does management invest time creating a new schedule?

If information about schedule slippage leaks out, project management looks bad, which creates an incentive to delay rescheduling for as long as possible (i.e., let’s pretend everything will turn out as planned). The Landmark Graphics data comes from an environment where management made weekly reports and estimates were updated whenever the core teams reached consensus (project average was eight times).

The longer a project is being worked on, the greater the opportunity for more unknowns to be discovered and the schedule to slip, i.e., longer projects are expected to acquire more re-estimates. The plot below shows the number of estimates made, for each project, against the initial estimated duration (red/green) and the actual duration (blue/purple); lines are loess fits (code+data):

Number of estimates against project initial estimated and actual duration.

What might be learned from any patterns appearing in this data?

When presented with data on the sequence of project estimates, my questions revolve around the reasons for spending time creating a new estimate, and the amount of time spent on the estimate.

A lot of time may have been invested in the original estimate, but how much time is invested in subsequent estimates? Are later estimates simply calculated as a percentage increase, a politically acceptable value (to the stakeholder funding for the project), or do they take into account what has been learned so far?

The information needed to answer these answers is not present in the data provided.

However, this evidence of the consistent provision of multiple project estimates drives another nail in to the coffin of estimation research based on project totals (e.g., if data on project estimates is provided, one estimate per project, were all estimates made during the same phase of the project?)

Multiple estimates for the same project

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

The first question I ask, whenever somebody tells me that a project was delivered on schedule (or within budget), is which schedule (or budget)?

New schedules are produced for projects that are behind schedule, and costs get re-estimated.

What patterns of behavior might be expected to appear in a project’s reschedulings?

It is to be expected that as a project progresses, subsequent schedules become successively more accurate (in the sense of having a completion date and cost that is closer to the final values). The term cone of uncertainty is sometimes applied as a visual metaphor in project management, with the schedule becoming less uncertain as the project progresses.

The only publicly available software project rescheduling data, from Landmark Graphics, is for completed projects, i.e., cancelled projects are not included (121 completed projects and 882 estimates).

The traditional project management slide has some accuracy metric improving as work on a project approaches completion. The plot below shows the percentage of a project completed when each estimate is made, against the ratio Actual/Estimate; the y-axis uses a log scale so that under/over estimates appear symmetrical (code+data):

Project actual/estimate ratio against percent complete.

The closer a point to the blue line, the more accurate the estimate. The red line shows maximum underestimation, i.e., estimating that the project is complete when there is still more work to be done. A new estimate must be greater than (or equal) to the work already done, i.e., Work_{done} <= Estimate, and Work_{done} = Actual*Percentage_{complete}.

Rearranging, we get: Actual/Estimate <= 1/Percentage_{complete} (plotted in red). The top of the ‘cone’ does not represent managements’ increasing certainty, with project progress, it represents the mathematical upper bound on the possible inaccuracy of an estimate.

In theory there is no limit on overestimating (i.e., points appearing below the blue line), but in practice management are under pressure to deliver as early as possible and to minimise costs. If management believe they have overestimated, they have an incentive to hang onto the time/money allocated (the future is uncertain).

Why does management invest time creating a new schedule?

If information about schedule slippage leaks out, project management looks bad, which creates an incentive to delay rescheduling for as long as possible (i.e., let’s pretend everything will turn out as planned). The Landmark Graphics data comes from an environment where management made weekly reports and estimates were updated whenever the core teams reached consensus (project average was eight times).

The longer a project is being worked on, the greater the opportunity for more unknowns to be discovered and the schedule to slip, i.e., longer projects are expected to acquire more re-estimates. The plot below shows the number of estimates made, for each project, against the initial estimated duration (red/green) and the actual duration (blue/purple); lines are loess fits (code+data):

Number of estimates against project initial estimated and actual duration.

What might be learned from any patterns appearing in this data?

When presented with data on the sequence of project estimates, my questions revolve around the reasons for spending time creating a new estimate, and the amount of time spent on the estimate.

A lot of time may have been invested in the original estimate, but how much time is invested in subsequent estimates? Are later estimates simply calculated as a percentage increase, a politically acceptable value (to the stakeholder funding for the project), or do they take into account what has been learned so far?

The information needed to answer these answers is not present in the data provided.

However, this evidence of the consistent provision of multiple project estimates drives another nail in to the coffin of estimation research based on project totals (e.g., if data on project estimates is provided, one estimate per project, were all estimates made during the same phase of the project?)

Cognitive bias or not paying enough attention?

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Assume you are responsible for two teams who independently work on projects, say Team A and Team B. The teams have different work completion rates, with Team A completing work at the rate of 70 widgets per week, while Team B completes 30 widgets per week. Both teams always work on projects that require the completion of the same number of widgets.

You have the resources to send just one of the teams on a course. It is predicted that sending Team A on the course would improve their performance to 110 widgets per week, while attending the course would improve the performance of Team B to 40 widgets per week.

Senior management have decreed that time to market is the metric by which project managers are judged.

You want to impress senior management by significantly improving time to market for your projects; which team do you send on the course (i.e., the one that is likely to experience the largest reduction in time to market)?

This question is a restatement of a one involving cars travelling at different speeds, that has grown into a niche research area. Studies have found that a large percentage of subjects give the wrong answer, and they are said to have a time-saving bias, or time-loss bias.

The inability to correctly process “inverse variables” has been given as the reason people tend to give the wrong answer. The term “inverse variables” comes from the formula for calculating completion time, where the velocity appears as the denominator. Another way of looking at this problem is that when going slowly, there is more scope for improvement, compared to when going much faster.

A speed increase from 30 to 40 is only 10, or a 33% improvement; while an increase from 70 to 110 is an increase of 40, or 57%. Based on these numbers, Team A should be sent on the course.

However, we are interested in time to market. Let’s assume that both teams have to complete a project requiring 100 widgets. Before attending the course, Team A completes 100 widgets in 100/70=1.4 weeks, and Team B completes 100 widgets in 100/30=3.3 weeks. After attending the course, Team A would complete 100 widgets in 100/110=0.91 weeks, and Team B would complete 100 widgets in 100/40=2.5 weeks. Time to market for Team A has been reduced by (1.4-0.9)=0.5 weeks, while the reduction for Team B is (3.3-2.5)=0.8 weeks. So sending Team B on the course makes you look better, on the time to market metric.

If somebody ran an experiment with project managers, would the subjects tend to incorrectly process “inverse variables”. Well, somebody has done the experiment, and yes, many subjects exhibited the time-saving bias (the experimental scenario described in the appendix is a lot easier to understand than the one in the main body of the paper, which is a mess; Magne Jørgensen continues to be the only person doing interesting experiments in software estimation).

It has become common practice that, when a large percentage of subjects in a psychology experiment respond in ways that are inconsistent with a mathematical approach, the behavior is labelled as being a bias. I think the use of this terminology makes the behavior sound more interesting than it actually is; what’s wrong with saying that people make mistakes. Perhaps labelling experimental responses as being a bias makes it easier to get papers published.

Whether people are biased, or don’t pay enough attention, when solving non-trivial equations, what might be done about it?

This is not about whether any particular metric is a useful one, rather it is about calculating the right answer for whatever metric happens to be chosen.

Would an awareness campaign highlighting the problems people have with “inverse variables” be worthwhile? I don’t think so. Many people have problems with equations, and I don’t see why this case is more worthy of being highlighted than any other.

Am I missing something?

Psychology researchers are interested in figuring out the functioning of the brain/mind, so they are looking for patterns in the responses subjects give. Once someone has published a few papers on a research topic, they become invested in it. If they continue to get funding, the papers keep on coming. Sometimes a niche topic acquires a major following, and the work contributes to a major change of thinking about the mind, e.g., the Wason selection task helped increase the evidence that culture has an impact on cognitive behavior.

I think that software engineering researchers need to carefully evaluate the likely importance of behaviors that psychology researchers have labelled as a bias.

Cognitive bias or not paying enough attention?

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Assume you are responsible for two teams who independently work on projects, say Team A and Team B. The teams have different work completion rates, with Team A completing work at the rate of 70 widgets per week, while Team B completes 30 widgets per week. Both teams always work on projects that require the completion of the same number of widgets.

You have the resources to send just one of the teams on a course. It is predicted that sending Team A on the course would improve their performance to 110 widgets per week, while attending the course would improve the performance of Team B to 40 widgets per week.

Senior management have decreed that time to market is the metric by which project managers are judged.

You want to impress senior management by significantly improving time to market for your projects; which team do you send on the course (i.e., the one that is likely to experience the largest reduction in time to market)?

This question is a restatement of a one involving cars travelling at different speeds, that has grown into a niche research area. Studies have found that a large percentage of subjects give the wrong answer, and they are said to have a time-saving bias, or time-loss bias.

The inability to correctly process “inverse variables” has been given as the reason people tend to give the wrong answer. The term “inverse variables” comes from the formula for calculating completion time, where the velocity appears as the denominator. Another way of looking at this problem is that when going slowly, there is more scope for improvement, compared to when going much faster.

A speed increase from 30 to 40 is only 10, or a 33% improvement; while an increase from 70 to 110 is an increase of 40, or 57%. Based on these numbers, Team A should be sent on the course.

However, we are interested in time to market. Let’s assume that both teams have to complete a project requiring 100 widgets. Before attending the course, Team A completes 100 widgets in 100/70=1.4 weeks, and Team B completes 100 widgets in 100/30=3.3 weeks. After attending the course, Team A would complete 100 widgets in 100/110=0.91 weeks, and Team B would complete 100 widgets in 100/40=2.5 weeks. Time to market for Team A has been reduced by (1.4-0.9)=0.5 weeks, while the reduction for Team B is (3.3-2.5)=0.8 weeks. So sending Team B on the course makes you look better, on the time to market metric.

If somebody ran an experiment with project managers, would the subjects tend to incorrectly process “inverse variables”. Well, somebody has done the experiment, and yes, many subjects exhibited the time-saving bias (the experimental scenario described in the appendix is a lot easier to understand than the one in the main body of the paper, which is a mess; Magne Jørgensen continues to be the only person doing interesting experiments in software estimation).

It has become common practice that, when a large percentage of subjects in a psychology experiment respond in ways that are inconsistent with a mathematical approach, the behavior is labelled as being a bias. I think the use of this terminology makes the behavior sound more interesting than it actually is; what’s wrong with saying that people make mistakes. Perhaps labelling experimental responses as being a bias makes it easier to get papers published.

Whether people are biased, or don’t pay enough attention, when solving non-trivial equations, what might be done about it?

This is not about whether any particular metric is a useful one, rather it is about calculating the right answer for whatever metric happens to be chosen.

Would an awareness campaign highlighting the problems people have with “inverse variables” be worthwhile? I don’t think so. Many people have problems with equations, and I don’t see why this case is more worthy of being highlighted than any other.

Am I missing something?

Psychology researchers are interested in figuring out the functioning of the brain/mind, so they are looking for patterns in the responses subjects give. Once someone has published a few papers on a research topic, they become invested in it. If they continue to get funding, the papers keep on coming. Sometimes a niche topic acquires a major following, and the work contributes to a major change of thinking about the mind, e.g., the Wason selection task helped increase the evidence that culture has an impact on cognitive behavior.

I think that software engineering researchers need to carefully evaluate the likely importance of behaviors that psychology researchers have labelled as a bias.

What can be learned from studying long gone development practices?

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Current ideas about the best way of building a software system are heavily influenced by the ideas that captured the attention of previous generations of developers. Can anything of practical use be learned from studying long gone techniques for building software systems?

During the writing of my software engineering book, I was spending a lot of time researching the development techniques used during the twentieth century, and one day I suddenly realised that this was a waste of time. While early software developers tend to be eulogized today, the reality is that they were mostly people who had little idea what they were doing, who through personal competence of being in the right place at the right time managed to produce something good enough. On the whole, twentieth century software development techniques are only of historical interest. Yes, some timeless development principles were discovered, and these can be integrated into today’s techniques (which may also turn out to be of their-time).

My experience of software development in the late 1970s and 1980s is that there was rarely any connection between what management told the world about the development process, and how those reporting to the manager actually did the development.

If you are a manager in a world where software development is still very new, and you are given the job of managing the development of a software system, how do you go about it? A common approach is to apply the techniques that are already being used to run the manager’s organization. On a regular basis, managers came up with the idea of applying techniques from the science of industrial production (which is still happening today).

In the 1970s and 1980s there were usually very visible job hierarchies, and sharply defined roles. Organizations tended to use their existing job hierarchies and roles to create the structure for their software development employees. For years after I started work as a graduate, managers and secretaries were surprised to see me typing; secretaries typed, men did not type, and women developers fumed when they were treated like secretaries (because they had been seen typing).

The manual workers performed data entry, operated the computer (e.g., mounted tapes, and looked after the printer). The junior staff often started with the job title programmer, or perhaps junior programmer and there might be senior programmers; on paper these people wrote the code to implement the functionality specified by a systems analyst (or just analyst, or business analyst, perhaps with added junior or senior). Analysts did not to write code and programmers only coded what the specification they were given, at least according to management.

Pay level was set by the position in the job hierarchy, with those higher up earning more than those below them, and job titles/roles were also mapped to positions in the hierarchy. This created, in theory, a direct correspondence between pay and job title/role. In practice, organizations wanted to keep their productive employees, and so were flexible about the correspondence between pay and title, e.g., during their annual review some people were more interested in the status provided by a job title, while others wanted more money and did not care about job titles. Add into this mix the fact that pay/title levels rarely matched up between organizations, it soon became obvious to all that software job titles were a charade.

How should the people at the sharp end go about building a software system?

Structured programming was the widely cited technique in the 1970s. Consultants promoted their own variants, with Jackson structured programming being widely known in the UK, with regular courses and consultants offering to train staff. Today, structured programming appears remarkably simplistic, great for writing tiny programs (it has an academic pedigree), but not for anything larger than a thousand lines. Part of its appeal may have been this simplicity, many programs were small (because computer memory was measured in kilobytes) and management often thought that problems were simple (a recurring problem). There were a few adaptations that tried to address larger scale issues, e.g., Warnier/Orr structured programming.

The military were major employers of software developers in the 1960s and 1970s. In the US Work Breakdown Structure was mandated by the DOD for project development (for all projects, not just software), and in the UK we had MASCOT. These mandated development methodologies were created by committees, and have not been experimentally tested to be better/worse than any other approach.

I think the best management technique for successfully developing a software system in the 1970s and 1980s (and perhaps in the following decades), is based on being lucky enough to have a few very capable people, and then providing them with what is needed to get the job done while maintaining the fiction to upper management that the agreed bureaucratic plan is being followed.

There is one technique for producing a software system that rarely gets mentioned: keep paying for development until something good enough is delivered. Given the life-or-death need an organization might have for some software systems, paying what it takes may well have been a prevalent methodology during the early days of major software development.

To answer the question posed at the start of this post. What might be learned from a study of early software development techniques is the need for management to have lots of luck and to be flexible; funding is easier to obtain when managing a life-or-death project.

What can be learned from studying long gone development practices?

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Current ideas about the best way of building a software system are heavily influenced by the ideas that captured the attention of previous generations of developers. Can anything of practical use be learned from studying long gone techniques for building software systems?

During the writing of my software engineering book, I was spending a lot of time researching the development techniques used during the twentieth century, and one day I suddenly realised that this was a waste of time. While early software developers tend to be eulogized today, the reality is that they were mostly people who had little idea what they were doing, who through personal competence of being in the right place at the right time managed to produce something good enough. On the whole, twentieth century software development techniques are only of historical interest. Yes, some timeless development principles were discovered, and these can be integrated into today’s techniques (which may also turn out to be of their-time).

My experience of software development in the late 1970s and 1980s is that there was rarely any connection between what management told the world about the development process, and how those reporting to the manager actually did the development.

If you are a manager in a world where software development is still very new, and you are given the job of managing the development of a software system, how do you go about it? A common approach is to apply the techniques that are already being used to run the manager’s organization. On a regular basis, managers came up with the idea of applying techniques from the science of industrial production (which is still happening today).

In the 1970s and 1980s there were usually very visible job hierarchies, and sharply defined roles. Organizations tended to use their existing job hierarchies and roles to create the structure for their software development employees. For years after I started work as a graduate, managers and secretaries were surprised to see me typing; secretaries typed, men did not type, and women developers fumed when they were treated like secretaries (because they had been seen typing).

The manual workers performed data entry, operated the computer (e.g., mounted tapes, and looked after the printer). The junior staff often started with the job title programmer, or perhaps junior programmer and there might be senior programmers; on paper these people wrote the code to implement the functionality specified by a systems analyst (or just analyst, or business analyst, perhaps with added junior or senior). Analysts did not to write code and programmers only coded what the specification they were given, at least according to management.

Pay level was set by the position in the job hierarchy, with those higher up earning more than those below them, and job titles/roles were also mapped to positions in the hierarchy. This created, in theory, a direct correspondence between pay and job title/role. In practice, organizations wanted to keep their productive employees, and so were flexible about the correspondence between pay and title, e.g., during their annual review some people were more interested in the status provided by a job title, while others wanted more money and did not care about job titles. Add into this mix the fact that pay/title levels rarely matched up between organizations, it soon became obvious to all that software job titles were a charade.

How should the people at the sharp end go about building a software system?

Structured programming was the widely cited technique in the 1970s. Consultants promoted their own variants, with Jackson structured programming being widely known in the UK, with regular courses and consultants offering to train staff. Today, structured programming appears remarkably simplistic, great for writing tiny programs (it has an academic pedigree), but not for anything larger than a thousand lines. Part of its appeal may have been this simplicity, many programs were small (because computer memory was measured in kilobytes) and management often thought that problems were simple (a recurring problem). There were a few adaptations that tried to address larger scale issues, e.g., Warnier/Orr structured programming.

The military were major employers of software developers in the 1960s and 1970s. In the US Work Breakdown Structure was mandated by the DOD for project development (for all projects, not just software), and in the UK we had MASCOT. These mandated development methodologies were created by committees, and have not been experimentally tested to be better/worse than any other approach.

I think the best management technique for successfully developing a software system in the 1970s and 1980s (and perhaps in the following decades), is based on being lucky enough to have a few very capable people, and then providing them with what is needed to get the job done while maintaining the fiction to upper management that the agreed bureaucratic plan is being followed.

There is one technique for producing a software system that rarely gets mentioned: keep paying for development until something good enough is delivered. Given the life-or-death need an organization might have for some software systems, paying what it takes may well have been a prevalent methodology during the early days of major software development.

To answer the question posed at the start of this post. What might be learned from a study of early software development techniques is the need for management to have lots of luck and to be flexible; funding is easier to obtain when managing a life-or-death project.

Christmas books for 2020

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

A very late post on the interesting books I read this year (only one of which was actually published in 2020). As always the list is short because I did not read many books and/or there is lots of nonsense out there, but this year I have the new excuses of not being able to spend much time on trains and having my own book to finally complete.

I have already reviewed The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, and it is the must-read of 2020 (after my book, of course :-).

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. This small, short book provides lots of interesting insights into the motivational factors involved in joining/following/leaving mass movements. Possible connections to software engineering might appear somewhat tenuous, but bits and pieces keep bouncing around my head. There are clearer connections to movements going mainstream this year.

The following two books came from asking what-if questions about the future of software engineering. The books I read suggesting utopian futures did not ring true.

“Money and Motivation: Analysis of Incentives in Industry” by William Whyte provides lots of first-hand experience of worker motivation on the shop floor, along with worker response to management incentives (from the pre-automation 1940s and 1950s). Developer productivity is a common theme in discussions I have around evidence-based software engineering, and this book illustrates the tangled mess that occurs when management and worker aims are not aligned. It is easy to imagine the factory-floor events described playing out in web design companies, with some web-page metric used by management as a proxy for developer productivity.

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century by Harry Braverman, to quote from Wikipedia, is an “… examination the nature of ‘skill’ and the finding that there was a decline in the use of skilled labor as a result of managerial strategies of workplace control.” It may also have discussed management assault of blue-collar labor under capitalism, but I skipped the obviously political stuff. Management do want to deskill software development, if only because it makes it easier to find staff, with the added benefit that the larger pool of less skilled staff increases management control, e.g., low skilled developers knowing they can be easily replaced.