Busting the Myths of Programmer Productivity

Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Webcast Series

Are the great programmers really 10 times faster than the rest? What does this difference in productivity even mean? What productivity distribution should we expect between professionals? How can we use this knowledge? In this webcast, we make the most of a large set of programmer training data using repeated measures to explore these questions.

What attendees will learn:

• For routine tasks, professional programmers have a narrower range of productivity than we first supposed, but almost half of the variation in individual productivity is noise, making programmer rankings suspect.

• Rather than finding the “fastest” programmers, we should find competent people and give them the training and environment they need to succeed.