The software profession has a problem, widely recognized but which nobody seems willing to do anything about. You can think of this problem as a variant of the well known "telephone game", where some trivial rumor is repeated from one person to the next until it has become distorted beyond recognition and blown up out of all proportion.

Unfortunately, the objects of this telephone game are generally considered cornerstone truths of the discipline, to the point that their acceptance now seems to hinder further progress.

In this short ebook, we will take a look at some of those "ground truths": the claimed 10x variation in productivity between developers; the "software crisis"; the cost-of-change curve; the "cone of uncertainty"; and more. We'll hone our scholarship skills by looking up the original source for these ideas and taking a deep dive in the history of their development. We'll assess the real weight of the evidence behind these ideas.

And we'll confront the scary prospect of moving the state of the art forward in a discipline that has had the ground kicked from under it.

This book is a work in progress. Visit the blog. Download the sample. Read the Preface - know just what you're getting.

1. Preface
2. Chapter 1: Software Engineering’s Telephone Game
3. How we got there
4. Surface plausibility
5. Who’s responsible?
6. Chapter 2: The Cone of Uncertainty
7. How to feel foolish in front of a class
8. Making sense of the picture
9. Getting to the facts
10. The telephone game in action
11. Controversy
12. What to make of all this?
13. Chapter 3: Why you should care about empirical results
14. The perils of empirical research
15. Discipline envy
16. Science and reality
17. Where to go from here
18. Chapter 4: The messy workings of scientific discourse
19. Modalities
20. Citation as modality
21. The construction of facts
22. Chapter 5: The hunt for the 10x files
23. Why is this important? Isn’t it obvious?
24. The impressive list of references
25. The original study and the 10x claim
26. Harshly criticized
27. The 10x files
28. Good study, bad study
29. The wild goose chase
30. Chapter 6: The Variable Programmer
31. Getting just the results you want
32. Within-subject variability
33. Rocket science: the NASA data
34. Needle in a haystack
35. The COCOMO haystacks
36. Environmental effects
37. Summing up
38. Chapter 7: Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Waterfall?
39. The standard story
40. Alternate endings
41. Just the facts
42. No paper is an island
43. Late bloomer
44. Birth of a myth
45. Chapter 8: Software’s Perpetual Crisis
46. Chapter 9: What do these mean anyway?
47. You keep using this word
48. I don’t think it means what you think it means
49. Chapter 10: The cost of defects: an illustrated history
50. Origins
51. First amendments
52. Where’s the data?
53. Metamorphoses
54. Changing the topic altogether
55. Boehm’s assent
56. Chapter 11: The cost of bad research
57. Extraordinarily suspect claims
58. Terms of inquiry
59. Critical thinking
60. Reading diagrams
61. Theory-laden diagrams
62. Research standards
63. Chapter 12: For some value of 56
64. Where bugs come from
65. Sample size of one
66. Tracing the spread
67. Poor requirements
68. A software triumph
69. Chapter 13: Raising the bar
70. Two modest proposals for publications on software development
71. Will you take the pledge?
72. Chapter 14: Rebuilding
73. Appendix A: bibliographical analysis of the 10x files
74. Questions of indirection
75. Summary results
76. The quest for primary sources
77. A better list: primary sources with empirical evidence
78. Appendix B: bibliographical analysis for the “defect-cost-increase curve”
79. The older references
80. The newer references
81. Appendix C - Conceptions and invention of waterfall
82. Invention of waterfall
83. Conceptions of waterfall (articles between 1970 and 1989)