Table of Contents

1. Preface
2. Chapter 1: Software Engineering’s Telephone Game
   1. How we got there
   2. Surface plausibility
   3. Who’s responsible?
3. Chapter 2: The Cone of Uncertainty
   1. How to feel foolish in front of a class
   2. Making sense of the picture
   3. Getting to the facts
   4. The telephone game in action
   5. Controversy
   6. What to make of all this?
4. Chapter 3: Why you should care about empirical results
   1. The perils of empirical research
   2. Discipline envy
   3. Science and reality
   4. Where to go from here
5. Chapter 4: The messy workings of scientific discourse
   1. Modalities
   2. Citation as modality
   3. The construction of facts
6. Chapter 5: The hunt for the 10x files
   1. Why is this important? Isn't it obvious?
   2. The impressive list of references
   3. The original study and the 10x claim
   4. Harshly criticized
   5. The 10x files
   6. Good study, bad study
   7. The wild goose chase
7. Chapter 6: The Variable Programmer
   1. Getting just the results you want
   2. Within-subject variability
   3. Rocket science: the NASA data
   4. Needle in a haystack
   5. The COCOMO haystacks
   6. Environmental effects
   7. Summing up
8. Chapter 7: Who's Afraid of The Big Bad Waterfall?
   1. A straw man argument
   2. Dusting off old tomes
   3. Nailing a few misconceptions
   4. Another great story hits the ground
9. Chapter 8: Software's Perpetual Crisis
10. Chapter 9: What do these mean anyway?
    1. You keep using this word
    2. I don't think it means what you think it means
11. Chapter 10: The cost of defects: an illustrated history
    1. Origins
    2. First amendments
    3. Where's the data?
    4. Metamorphoses
    5. Changing the topic altogether
    6. Boehm's assent
12. Chapter 11: The cost of bad research
    1. Extraordinarily suspect claims
    2. Terms of inquiry
    3. Critical thinking
    4. Reading diagrams
    5. Theory-laden diagrams
    6. Research standards
13. Chapter 12: For some value of 56
    1. Where bugs come from
    2. Sample size of one
    3. Tracing the spread
    4. Poor requirements
    5. A software triumph
14. Chapter 13: Raising the bar
    1. Two modest proposals for publications on software development
    2. Will you take the pledge?
15. Chapter 14: Rebuilding
16. Appendix A: bibliographical analysis of the 10x files
    1. Questions of indirection
    2. Summary results
    3. The quest for primary sources
    4. A better list: primary sources with empirical evidence
17. Appendix B: bibliographical analysis for the ``defect-cost-increase curve''
    1. The older references
    2. The newer references