Human-Oriented Improvement in the Software Process

By doing any task repeatedly, individuals can usually improve continuously due to the experience gained (called autonomous first-order learning). In addition, they can improve due to the injection of software development technology by the organization (called second-order learning). Organizations have studied such learning curves to make decisions regarding cost estimation and budgeting, production and labor scheduling, product pricing, etc. Such progress behavior was studied in a laboratory setting in an experiment involving a sample of 12 student software developers, who completed one small-sized project every week for ten weeks. A within-subject, repeated-measure, time-series quasi-experimental design was used as the research method. This also included the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) paradigm with some additional validation techniques from Social Sciences/MIS/Software Engineering. Statistical tests showed that on average, progress takes place at a rate of about 20%, with technology injection (i.e., second-order learning) amounting to 13% improvement over autonomous learning alone. Such a distinction is useful for making personal decisions in software development and managerial decisions regarding training programs and making engineering technology changes. The study was replicated, twice, with samples of size 30 and 12. The average progress rate for the 54 subjects (in the three studies) was 18.51%.