many of the problems related to software development are at the individual level, with those who create bad code rather than with any specific technology issue. therefore the goal of anyone staffing a project is to attract employees most likely to ensure success. the infamous 1968 study by sackman, erikson, and grant, "exploratory experimental studies comparing online and offline programming performance," concluded that productivity variation between good and bad developers was a factor of 10. the test was based on how quickly their subjects could write a program to solve a maze algorithm, and implicit in this was the assumption that the coders who solved it fastest were superior. its not an illogical conclusion to make. most computer science faculties do the same when they grade students based on their ability to write sort routines or their intimate knowledge of knuths programming fundamentals.
frederick p. brooks in the mythical man-month writes, "the hard part of building software is the specification, design, and testing of the conceptual construct, not the labor of r... 下一页