Developer Efficiency

Much has been written about the productivity of software developers. The term “10x programmer” has been used and abused. It can be traced back to the paper by Sackman et al. that first described the variations in ability of individuals to program and debug. Even though I’m not writing about individual differences here I’m mentioning this publication for another reason: It set out to compare how well people do when they should debug a problem and have or have not access to a computer: Online and offline debugging1. Read more