Study of developers for the cost of a phase I clinical drug trial
For many years now, I have been telling people that software researchers need to be more ambitious and apply for multi-million pound/dollar grants to run experiments in software engineering. After all, NASA spends a billion or so sending a probe to take some snaps of a planet and astronomers lobby for $100million funding for a new telescope.
What kind of experimental study might be run for a few million pounds (e.g., the cost of a Phase I clinical drug trial)?
Let’s say that each experiment involves a team of professional developers implementing a software system; call this a Project. We want the Project to be long enough to be realistic, say a week.
Different people exhibit different performance characteristics, and the experimental technique used to handle this is to have multiple teams independently implement the same software system. How many teams are needed? Fifteen ought to be enough, but more is better.
Different software systems contain different components that make implementation easier/harder for those involved. To remove single system bias, a variety of software systems need to be used as Projects. Fifteen distinct Projects would be great, but perhaps we can get away with five.
How many developers are on a team? Agile task estimation data shows that most teams are small, i.e., mostly single person, with two and three people teams making up almost all the rest.
If we have five teams of one person, five of two people, and five of three people, then there are 15 teams and 30 people.
How many people will be needed over all Projects?
15 teams (30 people) each implementing one Project 5 Projects, which will require 5*30=150 people (5*15=75 teams) |
How many person days are likely to be needed?
If a 3-person team takes a week (5 days), a 2-person team will take perhaps 7-8 days. A 1-person team might take 9-10 days.
The 15 teams will consume 5*3*5+5*2*7+5*1*9=190 person days The 5 Projects will consume 5*190=950 person days |
How much is this likely to cost?
The current average daily rate for a contractor in the UK is around £500, giving an expected cost of 190*500=£475,000 to hire the experimental subjects. Venue hire is around £40K (we want members of each team to be co-located).
The above analysis involves subjects implementing one Project. If, say, each subject implements two, three or four Projects, one after the other, the cost is around £2million, i.e., the cost of a Phase I clinical drug trial.
What might we learn from having subjects implement multiple Projects?
Team performance depends on the knowledge and skill of its members, and their ability to work together. Data from these experiments would be the first of their kind, and would provide realistic guidance on performance factors such as: impact of team size; impact of practice; impact of prior experience working together; impact of existing Project experience. The multiple implementations of the same Project created provide a foundation for measuring expected reliability and theories of N-version programming.
A team of 1 developer will take longer to implement a Project than a team of 2, who will take longer than a team of 3.
If 20 working days is taken as the ballpark period over which a group of subjects are hired (i.e., a month), there are six team size sequences that one subject could work (A to F below); where individual elapsed time is close to 20 days (team size 1 is 10 days elapsed, team size 2 is 7.5 days, team size 3 is 5 days).
Team size A B C D E F
1 twice once once
2 once thrice once
3 twice twice four |
The cost of hiring subjects+venue+equipment+support for such a study is likely to be at least £1,900,000.
If the cost of beta testing, venue hire and research assistants (needed during experimental runs) is included, the cost is close to £2.75 million.
Might it be cheaper and simpler to hire, say, 20-30 staff from a medium size development company? I chose a medium-sized company because we would be able to exert some influence over developer selection and keeping the same developers involved. The profit from 20-30 people for a month is not enough to create much influence within a large company, and a small company would not want to dedicate a large percentage of its staff for a solid month.
Beta testing is needed to validate both the specifications for each Project and that it is possible to schedule individuals to work in a sequence of teams over a month (individual variations in performance create a scheduling nightmare).
Definitely something we need, but with all the variables one has to control for (I’ve seen lists of 30+ such variables–probably from your book!), even a study of this magnitude would be criticized for not being large enough.
I’d recommend hiring unemployed developers, as they’d be cheaper for sure. But even with that suggestion, the unemployed are more likely to have had issues at the root of their unemployed status.
And you would almost need to plan for a pre-project phase where difficult people could be weeded out. (There’s always those that nobody can work with or get along with who would torpedo their entire team if kept around for the main project…)
@Grant Schultz
I’m hoping, and the (very sparse) evidence, points to a few variables being a lot more important than the rest; of which there are certainly many.
People regularly complain to me about the number of people who cannot program that apply for software development jobs. My experience at hackathons is that at least half of those attending are not fluent in any language. We are going to have to be hard-nosed about requiring people with some programming fluency, e.g., not purely cut-and-paste from Stackoverflow.