You always see them typing at their desks; they chafe for meetings to finish so that they can go back to their desks and code. When asked, they will say that there is not enough time to produce the code, and the sooner they can start coding, the sooner they will be done.
So writing code must be the most important thing, correct?
If the average programmer writes about 50 lines of production code a day. A 50,000 line program would take 1,000 man days to produce. The same 50,000 line listing can be entered by a programmer at about 1,000 lines a day or about 50 man days.
So what the heck are the developers doing for the other 950 days?
Before addressing the apparent contradiction, lets make a simple observation. Many methodologies (RUP, XP, Agile, Waterfall, etc) and programming languages have been compared over thousands of projects and we have determined that programmers write between 325 and 750 lines of code (LOC) per month.
That means the 1,000 LOC per month suggested above is optimistic1. Even if programmers do not average 50 lines of code per day, the following is clear2.
- Methodology does not explain the apparent productivity gap
- No language accounts for the apparent productivity gap
Or more correctly, the combination that yields a solution that neither QA nor the business analyst complains about.
That is why developers that plan their code before coding tend to outperform other developers. Few developers plan their code, but surprisingly, years of experience does not teach developers to learn to plan. Studies over 40 years show that developer productivity does not change with years of experience. (see No Experience Required!)
Years of experience do not lead to higher productivity
PSP can raise productivity by 21% and quality by 31%
If you are interested there are many other proven methods of raising code quality that are not commonly used (see Not Planning is for Losers).
If your developers at their keyboard and not planning at a white board then odds are that your productivity is not as high as it could be.
If developers are spending all their time trying different combinations of code until QA is satisfied, then it means that most of their time is really spent establishing correct pathways and removing defects. If you think about it, not having the correct pathways is a defect, so:
If developers are spending all their time trying different combinations of code until QA is satisfied, then it means that most of their time is really spent establishing correct pathways and removing defects. If you think about it, not having the correct pathways is a defect, so:
The reality is that there is not enough time to find the defects in the quickly written code
Interested in reducing defects in a cost-effective way? See Defects are for Losers.
Make no mistake, I am the biggest "Loser" of them all. I believe that I have made every mistake in the book at least once :-)
Bibliography
| 1 | The The Mythical Man Month is even more pessimistic suggesting that programmers produce 10 production lines of code per day |
| 2 | Jones, Capers and Bonsignour, Olivier. The Economics of Software Quality. Addison Wesley. 2011 |
| 3 | Watts, Humphrey. Introduction to the Personal Software Process, Addison Wesley Longman. 1997 |
Articles in the "Loser" series
| Want to see more sacred cows get tipped? Check out:
|
 |
| Moo? |
