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Measuring Engineering
Focus on the system, not the individuals?
The folks behind the paper analysed a data set of nearly 12000 contributors at over 200 organizations with the goal of finding the factors that impact cycle time, and how much variation is there? While all these factors do affect cycle time in expected ways, the effects are tiny compared to the enormous variability in the data. There’s a believable (at least to me) interpretation which involves some developers finishing tasks early, and then getting the “off-books” work done (improve the build, fix the gnarly mess left behind, scratch the itch with a refactoring).
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