Exploding Software Myths - MS Research

Over the last few years, Microsoft has been putting real study into development processes and techniques. Which makes sense, since they've got enough development teams to be able to do (mostly) controlled experiments.

Some of their findings:

• TDD: "code that was 60 to 90 percent better in terms of defect density...took longer to complete their projects—15 to 35 percent longer"
• Assertions: "definite negative correlation: more assertions and code verifications means fewer bugs. Looking behind the straight statistical evidence, they also found a contextual variable: experience."
• Organizational Structure: "Organizational metrics, which are not related to the code, can predict software failure-proneness with a precision and recall of 85 percent"
• Remote workers: "the differences were statistically negligible" for distributed development"

“I feel that we’ve closed the loop,” Nagappan says. “It started with Conway’s
Law, which Brooks cited in The Mythical Man-Month; now, we can show that,
yes, the design of the organization building the software system is as crucial
as the system itself.”

Awesome.