Re: ISO "anecdotal evidence"

Helmut Giese wrote:
Hello out there,
"everybody" knows that in a group of software developers (all things
being equal) the strongest can be N times as productive as the weakest
- for sometimes quite astonishing values of N.
"Everybody" with at least a certain knowledge of the software
development process, that is - but not my current boss.

I am in search of something to present to him which shows that this is
in fact, well, a fact - guess why :) - and anything could be useful:
scientific studies, any kind of reports, maybe just stories - could
be, stories are the best bet in this context.(hence the title of this
thread).

I tried Google of course, but most of the results for
"productivity (of) software developers"
(or simiilar) were of the kind
we offer tools to increase ...
- not exactly what I was looking for.

If you know of anything which would "fit", it would be greatly
appreciated.
Have a nice weekend and best regards
Helmut Giese

I googled for "programmer study productivity" (without the quotes) and this came up as the fourth match:

http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2008/03/27/productivity-variations-among-software-developers-and-teams-the-origin-of-quot-10x-quot.aspx

It references several studies.

There's a facinating anecdote in that article I would love to know the validity of:

"During the time I was at Boeing in the mid 1980s, there was a project that had about 80 programmers working on it that was at risk of missing a critical deadline. The project was critical to Boeing, and so they moved most of the 80 people off that project and brought in one guy who finished all the coding and delivered the software on time."

Another interesting fact is a comparison between the Lotus 123 and Excel 3.0 teams. Arguably those two projects were similar in scope, but one team produced 13,000 lines of code per staff year compared to the other at 1,500 lines of code per staff year. One project required 50 staff years, the other, 260. Interesting stuff.

And surely those numbers must be true if they are on the internet! :-)
.