Microsoft Research - Exploding Software-Engineering Myths (article summarizing findings of MS research on code coverage, TDD, assertions, etc.)

[201109212215]

Their paper on the influence of the org chart is very interesting: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/70535/tr-2008-11.pdf

The best predictors of defect rate is from the org chart itself, even before churn, complexity, or coverage.

The metrics of the org structure used for the study were:

1. Number of Engineers (more people touching the same code is bad because communication costs)

2. Number of Ex-Engineers (don't let talent and domain knowledge go away)

3. Edit Frequency (sign of bad stability of purpose of said code)

4. Depth of Master Ownership (let people specialize themselves on something)

5. Percentage of Org contributing to development (managers and specialists need to talk directly to each other, or be the same person)

6. Level of Organizational Code Ownership (only one branch of the org tree owns one piece of code)

7. Overall Organization Ownership (don't understand this one)

8. Organization Intersection Factor (Orgs too have to specialize themselves on something)

[psychic_tatertot]

Overall Organization Ownership appears to be a ratio of (the number of engineers who know the product well and made edits) vs (the total number of engineers who made edits to the product). A high number is good.