Post #4394008

@gvwilson@mastodon.social I got through question 17, but found many of the questions written to vague to answer with assurance and the first 17 took me 30 minutes to describe/qualify my answers. It’s impossible for me to complete, unless we are focusing solely on web-based using agile/scrum methodology. Some questions even include Scrum in the question itself. But that ignores a lot of software development, and as someone who developed and managed teams building safety-critical systems under DO-178 with a regulated waterfall process and mixed sensor arrays and build environments, the survey itself excludes me. Like one question is specifically about Infrastructure as Code, but those frameworks don’t even exist in many of the systems I worked on. Maybe I’m just too autistic and/or not the software demographic you want. I mean here is my answer to question #1: You have not clearly defined the terms. Are we thinking about group performance across peopl or individual performance across time? Another relationship? Do we have normalization for experience? Code understanding? Etc? We have a quantitative value of improvement (15%), but a qualitative metric (“better”). Without defining better quantitatively, this cannot be measured. Is better equal to faster? “faster to write?” “Faster to run?” “Faster to compile?” “Faster to troubleshoot?” “Faster to refactor?” “Faster to retrieve a real-time signal from an aircraft transponder and decode it, calculating the travel time and aircraft position, and returning a guidance signal via antenna?” Or is better equal to more lines of code? Or fewer lines of code? Or better abstracted? Or more modular? The measurement and the metric are too unclear to answer. Perhaps a single junior developer, working more efficiently, can only improve by some arbitrary metric by 15%, while a senior developer experienced with the codebase and compiler could improve that metric by 100%. I feel like we need to think more closely about the real core of the question we are trying to answer and reframe this with more focus.