A surprising retrospective task estimation dataset
When estimating the time needed to implement a task, the time previously needed to implement similar tasks provides useful guidance. The implementation time for these previous tasks may itself be estimated, because the actual time was not measured or this information is currently unavailable.
How accurate are developer time estimates of previously completed tasks?
I am not aware of any software related dataset of estimates of previously completed tasks (it’s hard enough finding datasets containing information on the actual implementation time). However, I recently found the paper Dynamics of retrospective timing: A big data approach by Balcı, Ünübol, Grondin, Sayar, van Wassenhove, and Wittmann. The data analysed comes from a survey questionnaire, where 24,494 people estimated the how much time they had spent answering the questions, along with recording the current time at the start/end of the questionnaire. The supplementary data is in MATLAB format, and is also available as a csv file in the Blursday database (i.e., RT_Datasets).
Some of the behavior patterns seen in software engineering estimates appear to be general human characteristics, e.g., use of round numbers. An analysis of the estimation performance of a wide sample of the general population could help separate out characteristics that are specific to software engineering and those that apply to the general population.
The following table shows the percentage of answers giving a particular Estimate and Actual time, in minutes. Over 60% of the estimates are round numbers. Actual times are likely to be round numbers because people often give a round number when asked the time (code+data):
Minutes Estimate Actual
20 18% 8.5%
15 15% 5.3%
30 12% 7.6%
25 10% 6.2%
10 7.7% 2.1% |
I was surprised to see that the authors had fitted a regression model with the Actual time as the explanatory variable and the Estimate as the response variable. The estimation models I have fitted always have the roles of these two variables reversed. More of this role reversal difference below.
The equation fitted to the data by the authors is (they use the term Elapsed, for consistency with other blog articles I continue to use Actual; code+data):
This equation says that, on average, for shorter Actual times the Estimate is higher than the Actual, while for longer Actual times the average Estimate is lower.
Switching the roles of the variables, I expected to see a fitted model whose coefficients are somewhat similar to the algebraically transformed version of this equation, i.e., 
. At the very least, I expected the exponent to be greater than one.
Surprisingly, the equation fitted with the variables roles reversed is very similar, i.e., the equations are the opposite of each other:
This equation says that, on average, for shorter Estimate times the Actual time is higher than the Estimate, while for longer Estimate times the average Actual is lower, i.e., the opposite behavior specifie dby the earlier equation.
I spent some time trying to understand how it was possible for data to be fitted such that (x ~ y) == (y ~ x), even posting a question to Cross Validated. I might, in a future post, discuss the statistical issues behind this behavior.
So why did the authors of this paper treat Actual as an explanatory variable?
After a flurry of emails with the lead author, Fuat Balcı (who was very responsive to my questions), where we both doubled checked the code/data and what we thought was going on, Fuat answered that (quoted with permission):
“The objective duration is the elapsed time (noted by the experimenter based on a clock reading), and the estimate is the participant’s response. According to the psychophysical approach the mapping between objective and subjective time can be defined by regressing the subjective estimates of the participants on the objective duration noted by the experimenter. Thus, if your research question is how human’s retrospective experience of time changes with the duration of events (e.g., biases in time judgments), the y-axis should be the participant’s response and the x-axis should be the actual duration.”
This approach has a logic to it, and is consistent with the regression modelling done by other researchers who study retrospective time estimation.
So which modelling approach is correct, and are people overestimating or underestimating shorter actual time durations?
Going back to basics, the structure of this experiment does not produce data that meets one of the requirements of the statistical technique we are both using (ordinary least squares) to fit a regression model. To understand why ordinary least squares, OLS, is not applicable to this data, it’s necessary to delve into a technical detail about the mathematics of what OLS does.
The equation actually fitted by OLS is: 
, where 
is an error term (i.e., ‘noise’ caused by all the effects other than 
). The value of is assumed to be exact, i.e., not contain any ‘noise’.
Usually, in a retrospective time estimation experiment, subjects hear, for instance, a sound whose duration is decided in advance by the experimenter; subjects estimate how long each sound lasted. In this experimental format, it makes sense for the Actual time to appear on the right-hand-side as an explanatory variable and for the Estimate response variable on the left-hand-side.
However, for the questionnaire timing data, both the Estimate and Actual time are decided by the person giving the answers. There is no experimenter controlling one of the values. Both the Estimate and Actual values contain ‘noise’. For instance, on a different day a person may have taken more/less time to actually answer the questionnaire, or provided a different estimate of the time taken.
The correct regression fitting technique to use is errors-in-variables. An errors-in-variables regression fits the equation: 
, where: 
is the true value of and 
is its associated error. A selection of packages are available for fitting a variety of errors-in-variables models.
I regularly see OLS used in software engineering papers (including mine) where errors-in-variables is the technically correct technique to use. Researchers are either unaware of the error issues or assuming that the difference is not important. The few times I have fitted an errors-in-variables model, the fitted coefficients have not been much different from those fitted by an OLS model; for this dataset the coefficient difference is obviously important.
The complication with building an errors-in-variables model is that values need to be specified for the error terms and . With OLS the value of is produced as part of the fitting process.
How might the required error values be calculated?
If some subjects round reported start/stop times, there may not be any variation in reported Actual time, or it may jump around in 5-minute increments depending on the position of the minute hand on the clock.
Learning researchers have run experiments where each subject performs the same task multiple times. Performance improves with practice, which makes it difficult to calculate the likely variability in the first-time performance. If we assume that performance is skill based, the standard deviation of all the subjects completing within a given timeframe could be used to calculate an error term.
With 60% of Estimates being round numbers, there might not be any variation for many people, or perhaps the answer given will change to a different round number. There is Estimate data for different, future tasks, and a small amount of data for the same future tasks. There is data from many retrospective studies using very short time intervals (e.g., tens of seconds), which might be applicable.
We could simply assume that the same amount of error is present in each variable. Deming regression is an errors-in-variables technique that supports this approach, and does not require any error values to be specified. The following equations have been fitted using Deming regression (code+data):
and
While these two equations are consistent with each other, we don’t know if the assumption of equal errors in both variables is realistic.
What next?
Hopefully it will be possible to work out reasonable error values for the Actual/Estimate times. Fitting a model using these values will tell us wether any over/underestimating is occurring, and the associated span of time durations.
I also need to revisit the analysis of software task estimation times.
Workshop on data analysis for software developers
I’m teaching a workshop on data analysis for software engineers on 22 June. The workshop is organized by the British Computer Society’s SPA specialist group, and can be attended remotely.
Why is there a small registration charge (between £2 and £15)? Typically, 30% to 50% of those registered for a free event actually turn up. It is very frustrating when all the places are taken, people are turned away, and then only half those registered turn up. We decided to charge a minimal amount to deter the uncommitted, and include lunch. Why the variable pricing? The BCS have a rule that members have to get a discount, and HMRC does not allow paid+free options (I suspect this has more to do with the software the BCS are using).
It’s a hands-on workshop that aims to get people up and running with practical data analysis. As always, my data analysis hammer of choice is regression analysis.
A few things are being updated since I last gave this workshop?
While my completed book Evidence-based Software Engineering was not available when the last workshop was given, the second half containing the introductory statistics material was available for download. There has not been any major changes to the statistical material in this second half.
The one new statistical observation I plan to highlight is that in software engineering, there is a lot of data that does not have a normal distribution. Many data analysis are aimed at the social sciences (the biggest market), and they frequently just assume that all the data is normally distributed; software engineering data is different.
For a very long time I have known that most developers/managers do not collect and analyse measurements of their development processes. However, I had underestimated ‘most’, which I now think is at least 99%.
Given the motivation, developers/managers would measure and analyse processes. I plan to update the material to have a motivational theme, along with illustrating the statistical points being made. The purpose of the motivational examples is to give attendees something to take back and show their managers/coworkers: Look, we can find out where all our money/time is being wasted. I assume that attendees are already interested in analysing software engineering data (why else would they be spending a Saturday at the workshop).
I have come up with a great way of showing how many of software engineering’s cited ‘facts’ are simply folklore derived from repeating opinions from papers published long ago (or derived from pitifully small amounts of data). The workshop is hands-on, with attendees individually working through examples. The plan is for examples to be based on the data behind some of these ‘facts’, e.g., Halstead & McCabe metrics, and COCOMO.
Tips, and suggestions for topics to discuss welcome.
Survey papers: LLMs will restore some level of usefulness
Scientific papers are like soap operas, in that understanding them requires readers to have some degree of familiarity with the ongoing plot.
How can people new to an opera quickly get up to speed with the ongoing story lines, without reading hundreds of papers?
The survey paper is intended to be the answer to this question. Traditionally written by an established researcher in the field, the 100+ pages aim to be an authoritative overview of the progress and setbacks of research on a particular topic within the last 5/10/15 years (depending on the rate/lack of progress since the last major survey paper).
These days research papers are often written by PhD students, with the professor doing the supervising, and getting their name tacked on to the end of the list of authors (professors can spend more time writing grant applications than writing research papers). Writing a single 100+ page survey paper is not a cost-effective use of an experienced person’s time, given the pressure to pump out papers, even when the ACM Computing Surveys is one of the highest ranked journals in computing. The short lifecycle of fields driven by the next fashionable topic is another disincentive.
Given the incentives, why are survey papers still being published?
In software engineering there are now two kinds of survey papers: 1) the traditional kind, written by people who see it as a service, or are not on the publish/perish treadmill, or early stage researchers surveying a niche topic, 2) PhD students using what we now call a Large language model summary approach, soon to be replaced by real LLMs.
So-called survey papers (at least in software engineering) are now regularly being written by members of the intended audience of traditional survey papers, i.e., PhD students who are new to the field and want a map of the territory showing the routes to the frontiers.
How does a person who knows almost nothing about a field write a (20-40 page, rarely 100+) survey paper about it?
A survey is based on the list of all the appropriate papers. In theory, appropriate papers have to meet some quality criteria, e.g., be published in a reputable journal/conference/blog. In practice, the list is created by searching various academic publication search engines (e.g., web of science, or the ACM digital library) using a targeted regular expression; for instance:
(agile OR waterfall OR software OR "story points" OR "story point" OR "user stories" OR "function points" OR "planning poker" OR "pomodoros" OR "use case" OR "source code" OR "DORA metrics" OR scrum) (predict OR prediction OR quantify OR dataset OR schedule OR lifecycle OR "life cycle" OR estimate OR estimates OR estimating OR estimation OR estimated OR #noestimates OR "evidence" OR empirical OR evolution OR ecosystems OR cognitive OR economics OR reliability OR metrics OR experiment) |
The list of papers returned may be filtered further, depending on how many there are (a hundred or two does not look too lightweight, and does not require an excessive amount of work).
Next, what to say about these papers, and how many of them actually need to be read?
The bottom of the barrel, vacant ideas, survey paper tabulates easily calculated metrics (e.g., number of papers per year, number of authors per paper, clusters of keywords), and babble on about paper selection criteria, keyword growth and diversity, and more research is needed.
For a survey paper to appear in a layer above the vacant ideas level, the authors have to process some amount of the paper contents. The paper A Systematic Literature Review on Reasons and Approaches for Accurate Effort Estimations in Agile by Pasuksmit, Thongtanunam, and Karunasekera is a recent example of one such survey. The search criteria returned 519 papers, of which 82 were selected for inclusion, i.e., cited. The first 10, of the 42 pages, covered the selection process and the process used to answer the two research questions; RQ1: What are the discovered reasons for inaccurate estimations in Agile iterative development? and RQ2: What are the approaches proposed to improve effort estimation in Agile iterative development?
The main answers to the research questions appeared in: 1) tables which listed attributes relating to the question and the papers that had something to say about that attribute, and 2) sections containing a few paragraphs highlighting various points made by papers about some attribute.
My primary interest was Table 11, which listed the papers/dataset used. A few were new to me, but unfortunately all confidential.
A survey can only be as good as the papers it is based on. The regular expression approach can miss important papers and include unimportant papers. The Pasuksmit et al paper only included one paper by the leading researcher in Agile effort estimation, and included papers that I wouldn’t waste disk space on a pdf file.
I would not recommend these ‘LLM’ style surveys to newcomers to a field. They don’t connect the lines of research, call out the successes/failures, and they don’t provide a map of the territory.
The readership of these survey papers are the experienced researchers, who will scan the list of cited papers looking for anything they might have missed.
I’m not expecting LLMs to be capable of producing experienced professor level survey papers any time soon. In a year or two, LLMs will surely be doing a better job than PhD students.
Chinchilla Scaling: A replication using the pdf
The paper Chinchilla Scaling: A replication attempt by Besiroglu, Erdil, Barnett, and You caught my attention. Not only a replication, but on the first page there is the enticing heading of section 2, “Extracting data from Hoffmann et al.’s Figure 4”. Long time readers will know of my interest in extracting data from pdfs and images.
This replication found errors in the original analysis, and I, in turn, found errors in the replication’s data extraction.
Besiroglu et al extracted data from a plot by first converting the pdf to Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) format, and then processing the SVG file. A quick look at their python code suggested that the process was simpler than extracting directly from an uncompressed pdf file.
Accessing the data in the plot is only possible because the original image was created as a pdf, which contains information on the coordinates of all elements within the plot, not as a png or jpeg (which contain information about the colors appearing at each point in the image).
I experimented with this pdf-> svg -> csv route and quickly concluded that Besiroglu et al got lucky. The output from tools used to read-pdf/write-svg appears visually the same, however, internally the structure of the svg tags is different from the structure of the original pdf. I found that the original pdf was usually easier to process on a line by line basis. Besiroglu et al were lucky in that the svg they generated was easy to process. I suspect that the authors did not realize that pdf files need to be decompressed for the internal operations to be visible in an editor.
I decided to replicate the data extraction process using the original pdf as my source, not an extracted svg image. The original plots are below, and I extracted Model size/Training size for each of the points in the left plot (code+data):
What makes this replication and data interesting?
Chinchilla is a family of large language models, and this paper aimed to replicate an experimental study of the optimal model size and number of tokens for training a transformer language model within a specified compute budget. Given the many millions of £/$ being spent on training models, there is a lot of interest in being able to estimate the optimal training regimes.
The loss model fitted by Besiroglu et al, to the data they extracted, was a little different from the model fitted in the original paper:
Original: 
Replication: 
where: 
is the number of model parameters, and 
is the number of training tokens.
If data extracted from the pdf is different in some way, then the replication model will need to be refitted.
The internal pdf operations specify the x/y coordinates of each colored circle within a defined rectangle. For this plot, the bottom left/top right coordinates of the rectangle are: (83.85625, 72.565625), (421.1918175642, 340.96202) respectively, as specified in the first line of the extracted pdf operations below. The three values before each rg operation specify the RGB color used to fill the circle (for some reason duplicated by the plotting tool), and on the next line the /P0 Do is essentially a function call to operations specified elsewhere (it draws a circle), the six function parameters precede the call, with the last two being the x/y coordinates (e.g., x=154.0359138125, y=299.7658568695), and on subsequent calls the x/y values are relative to the current circle coordinates (e.g., x=-2.4321790463 y=-34.8834544196).
Q Q q 83.85625 72.565625 421.1918175642 340.96202 re W n 0.98137749 0.92061729 0.86536915 rg 0 G 0.98137749 0.92061729 0.86536915 rg 1 0 0 1 154.0359138125 299.7658568695 cm /P0 Do 0.97071849 0.82151775 0.71987163 rg 0.97071849 0.82151775 0.71987163 rg 1 0 0 1 -2.4321790463 -34.8834544196 cm /P0 Do |
The internal pdf x/y values need to be mapped to the values appearing on the visible plot’s x/y axis. The values listed along a plot axis are usually accompanied by tick marks, and the pdf operation to draw these tick marks will contain x/y values that can be used to map internal pdf coordinates to visible plot coordinates.
This plot does not have axis tick marks. However, vertical dashed lines appear at known Training FLOP values, so their internal x/y values can be used to map to the visible x-axis. On the y-axis, there is a dashed line at the 40B size point and the plot cuts off at the 100B size (I assumed this, since they both intersect the label text in the middle); a mapping to the visible y-axis just needs two known internal axis positions.
Extracting the internal x/y coordinates, mapping them to the visible axis values, and comparing them against the Besiroglu et al values, finds that the x-axis values agreed to within five decimal places (the conversion tool they used rounded the 10-digit decimal places present in the pdf), while the y-axis values appeared to differ differed by about 10%.
I initially assumed that the difference was due to a mistake by me; the internal pdf values were so obviously correct that there had to be a simple incorrect assumption I made at some point. Eventually, an internal consistency check on constants appearing in Besiroglu et al’s svg->csv code found the mistake. Besiroglu et al calculate the internal y coordinate of some of the labels on the y-axis by, I assume, taking the internal svg value for the bottom left position of the text and adding an amount they estimated to be half the character height. The python code is:
y_tick_svg_coords = [26.872, 66.113, 124.290, 221.707, 319.125] y_tick_data_coords = [100e9, 40e9, 10e9, 1e9, 100e6] |
The internal pdf values I calculated are consistent with the internal svg values 26.872, and 66.113, corresponding to visible y-axis values 100B and 40B. I could not find an accurate means of calculating character heights, and it turns out that Besiroglu et al’s calculation was not accurate.
I published the original version of this article, and contacted the first two authors of the paper (Besiroglu and Erdil). A few days later, Besiroglu replied with details of why they thought that the 40B line I was using as a reference point was actually at either 39.5B or 39.6B (based on published values for the Gopher budget on the x-axis), but there was uncertainty.
What other information was available to resolve the uncertainty? Ah, the right plot has Model size on the x-axis and includes lines that appear to correspond with axis values. The minimum/maximum Model size values extracted from the right plot closely match those in the original paper, i.e., that ’40B’ line is actually at 39.554B (mapping this difference from a log scale is enough to create the 10% difference in the results I calculated).
My thanks to Tamay Besiroglu and Ege Erdil for taking the time to explain their rationale.
The y-axis uses a log scale, and the ratio of the distance between the 10B/100B virtual tick marks and the 40B/100B virtual tick marks should be 
. The Besiroglu et al values are not consistent with this ratio; consistent values below (code+data):
# y_tick_svg_coords = [26.872, 66.113, 124.290, 221.707, 319.125] y_tick_svg_coords = [26.872, 66.113, 125.4823, 224.0927, 322.703] |
When these new values are used in the python svg extraction code, the calculated y-axis values agree with my calculated y-axis values.
What is the equation fitted using these corrected Model size value? Answer below:
Replication:
Corrected size: 
The replication paper also fitted the data using a bootstrap technique. The replication values (Table 1), and the corrected values are below (standard errors in brackets; code+data):
Parameter Replication Corrected
A 482.01 370.16
(124.58) (148.31)
B 2085.43 2398.85
(1293.23) (1151.75)
E 1.82 1.80
(0.03) (0.03)
α 0.35 0.33
(0.02) (0.02)
β 0.37 0.37
(0.02) (0.02) |
where the fitted equation is: 
What next?
The data contains 245 rows, which is a small sample. As always, more data would be good.
Relative sizes of computer companies
How large are computer companies, compared to each other and to companies in other business areas?
Stock market valuation is a one measure of company size, another is a company’s total revenue (i.e., total amount of money brought in by a company’s operations). A company can have a huge revenue, but a low stock market valuation because it makes little profit (because it has to spend an almost equally huge amount to produce that income) and things are not expected to change.
The plot below shows the stock market valuation of IBM/Microsoft/Apple, over time, as a percentage of the valuation of tech companies on the US stock exchange (code+data on Github):
The growth of major tech companies, from the mid-1980s caused IBM’s dominant position to dramatically decline, while first Microsoft, and then Apple, grew to have more dominant market positions.
Is IBM’s decline in market valuation mirrored by a decline in its revenue?
The Fortune 500 was an annual list of the top 500 largest US companies, by total revenue (it’s now a global company list), and the lists from 1955 to 2012 are available via the Wayback Machine. Which of the 1,959 companies appearing in the top 500 lists should be classified as computer companies? Lacking a list of business classification codes for US companies, I asked Chat GPT-4 to classify these companies (responses, which include a summary of the business area). GPT-4 sometimes classified companies that were/are heavy users of computers, or suppliers of electronic components as a computer company. For instance, I consider Verizon Communications to be a communication company.
The plot below shows the ranking of those computer companies appearing within the top 100 of the Fortune 500, after removing companies not primarily in the computer business (code+data):
IBM is the uppermost blue line, ranking in the top-10 since the late-1960s. Microsoft and Apple are slowly working their way up from much lower ranks.
These contrasting plots illustrate the fact that while IBM continued to a large company by revenue, its low profitability (and major losses) and the perceived lack of a viable route to sustainable profitability resulted in it having a lower stock market valuation than computer companies with much lower revenues.
Average lines added/deleted by commits across languages
Are programs written in some programming language shorter/longer, on average, than when written in other languages?
There is a lot of variation in the length of the same program written in the same language, across different developers. Comparing program length across different languages requires a large sample of programs, each implemented in different languages, and by many different developers. This sounds like a fantasy sample, given the rarity of finding the same specification implemented multiple times in the same language.
There is a possible alternative approach to answering this question: Compare the size of commits, in lines of code, for many different programs across a variety of languages. The paper: A Study of Bug Resolution Characteristics in Popular Programming Languages by Zhang, Li, Hao, Wang, Tang, Zhang, and Harman studied 3,232,937 commits across 585 projects and 10 programming languages (between 56 and 60 projects per language, with between 58,533 and 474,497 commits per language).
The data on each commit includes: lines added, lines deleted, files changed, language, project, type of commit, lines of code in project (at some point in time). The paper investigate bug resolution characteristics, but does not include any data on number of people available to fix reported issues; I focused on all lines added/deleted.
Different projects (programs) will have different characteristics. For instance, a smaller program provides more scope for adding lots of new functionality, and a larger program contains more code that can be deleted. Some projects/developers commit every change (i.e., many small commit), while others only commit when the change is completed (i.e., larger commits). There may also be algorithmic characteristics that affect the quantity of code written, e.g., availability of libraries or need for detailed bit twiddling.
It is not possible to include project-id directly in the model, because each project is written in a different language, i.e., language can be predicted from project-id. However, program size can be included as a continuous variable (only one LOC value is available, which is not ideal).
The following R code fits a basic model (the number of lines added/deleted is count data and usually small, so a Poisson distribution is assumed; given the wide range of commit sizes, quantile regression may be a better approach):
alang_mod=glm(additions ~ language+log(LOC), data=lc, family="poisson") dlang_mod=glm(deletions ~ language+log(LOC), data=lc, family="poisson") |
Some of the commits involve tens of thousands of lines (see plot below). This sounds rather extreme. So two sets of models are fitted, one with the original data and the other only including commits with additions/deletions containing less than 10,000 lines.
These models fit the mean number of lines added/deleted over all projects written in a particular language, and the models are multiplicative. As expected, the variance explained by these two factors is small, at around 5%. The two models fitted are (code+data):
or 
, and 
or 
, where the value of 
is listed in the following table, and 
is the number of lines of code in the project:
Original 0 < lines < 10000
Language Added Deleted Added Deleted
C 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
C# 1.7 1.6 1.5 1.5
C++ 1.9 2.1 1.3 1.4
Go 1.4 1.2 1.3 1.2
Java 0.9 1.0 1.5 1.5
Javascript 1.1 1.1 1.3 1.6
Objective-C 1.2 1.4 2.0 2.4
PHP 2.5 2.6 1.7 1.9
Python 0.7 0.7 0.8 0.8
Ruby 0.3 0.3 0.7 0.7 |
These fitted models suggest that commit addition/deletion both increase as project size increases, by around 
, and that, for instance, a commit in Go adds 1.4 times as many lines as C, and delete 1.2 as many lines (averaged over all commits). Comparing adds/deletes for the same language: on average, a Go commit adds 
lines, and deletes 
lines.
There is a strong connection between the number of lines added/deleted in each commit. The plot below shows the lines added/deleted by each commit, with the red line showing a fitted regression model 
(code+data):
What other information can be included in a model? It is possible that project specific behavior(s) create a correlation between the size of commits; the algorithm used to fit this model assumes zero correlation. The glmer function, in the R package lme4, can take account of correlation between commits. The model component (language | project) in the following code adds project as a random effect on the language variable:
del_lmod=glmer(deletions ~ language+log(LOC)+(language | project), data=lc_loc, family=poisson) |
It takes around 24hr of cpu time to fit this model, which means I have not done much experimentation…
Software companies in the UK
How many software companies are there in the UK, and where are they concentrated?
This question begs the question of what kinds of organization should be counted as a software company. My answer to this question is driven by the available data. Companies House is the executive agency of the British Government that maintains the register of UK companies, and basic information on 5,562,234 live companies is freely available.
The Companies House data does not include all software companies. A very small company (e.g., one or two people) might decide to save on costs and paperwork by forming a partnership (companies registered at Companies House are required to file audited accounts, once a year).
When registering, companies have to specify the business domain in which they operate by selecting the appropriate Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code, e.g., Section J: INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION, Division 62: Computer programming, consultancy and related activities, Class 62.01: Computer programming activities, Sub-class 62.01/2: Business and domestic software development. A company’s SIC code can change over time, as the business evolves.
Searching the description associated with each SIC code, I selected the following list of SIC codes for companies likely to be considered a ‘software company’:
62011 Ready-made interactive leisure and entertainment
software development
62012 Business and domestic software development
62020 Information technology consultancy activities
62030 Computer facilities management activities
62090 Other information technology service activities
63110 Data processing, hosting and related activities
63120 Web portals |
There are 287,165 companies having one of these seven SIC codes (out of the 1,161 SIC codes currently used); 5.2% of all currently live companies. The breakdown is:
All 62011 62012 62020 62030 62090 63110 63120 5,562,234 7,217 68,834 134,461 3,457 57,132 7,839 8,225 100% 0.15% 1.2% 2.4% 0.06% 1.0% 0.14% 0.15% |
Only one kind of software company (SIC 62020) appears in the top ten of company SIC codes appearing in the data:
Rank SIC Companies 1 68209 232,089 Other letting and operating of own or leased real estate 2 82990 213,054 Other business support service activities n.e.c. 3 70229 211,452 Management consultancy activities other than financial management 4 68100 194,840 Buying and selling of own real estate 5 47910 165,227 Retail sale via mail order houses or via Internet 6 96090 134,992 Other service activities n.e.c. 7 62020 134,461 Information technology consultancy activities 8 99999 130,176 Dormant Company 9 98000 118,433 Residents property management 10 41100 117,264 Development of building projects |
Is the main business of a company reflected in its registered SIC code?
Perhaps a company started out mostly selling hardware with a little software, registered the appropriate non-software SIC code, but over time there was a shift to most of the income being derived from software (or the process ran in reverse). How likely is it that the SIC code will change to reflect the change of dominant income stream? I have no idea.
A feature of working as an individual contractor in the UK is that there were/are tax benefits to setting up a company, say A Ltd, and be employed by this company which invoices the company, say B Ltd, where the work is actually performed (rather than have the individual invoice B Ltd directly). IR35 is the tax legislation dealing with so-called ‘disguised’ employees (individuals who work like payroll staff, but operate and provide services via their own limited company). The effect of this practice is that what appears to be a software company in the Companies House data is actually a person attempting to be tax efficient. Unfortunately, the bulk downloadable data does not include information that might be used to filter out these cases (e.g., number of employees).
Are software companies concentrated in particular locations?
The data includes a registered address for each company. This address may be the primary business location, or its headquarters, or the location of accountants/lawyers working for the business, or a P.O. Box address. The latitude/longitude of the center of each address postcode is available. The first half of the current postcode, known as the outcode, divides the country into 2,951 areas; these outcode areas are the bins I used to count companies.
Are there areas where the probability of a company being a software company is much higher than the national average (5.265%)? The plot below shows a heat map of outcode areas having a higher than average percentage of software companies (36 out of 2,277 outcodes were at least a factor of two greater than the national average; BH7 is top with 5.9 times more companies, then RG6 with 3.7 times, BH21 with 3.6); outcodes having fewer than 10 software companies were excluded (red is highest, green lowest; code+data):
The higher concentrations are centered around the country’s traditional industrial towns and cities, with a cluster sprawling out from London. Cambridge is often cited as a high-tech region, but its highest outcode, CB4, is ranked 39th, at twice the national average (presumably the local high-tech is primarily non-software oriented).
Which outcode areas contain the most software companies? The following list shows the top ten outcodes, by number of registered companies (only BN3 and CF14 are outside London):
Rank Outcode Software companies
1 WC2H 10,860
2 EC1V 7,449
3 N1 6,244
4 EC2A 3,705
5 W1W 3,205
6 BN3 2,410
7 CF14 2,326
8 WC1N 2,223
9 E14 2,192
10 SW19 1,516 |
I’m surprised to see west-central London with so many software companies. Perhaps these companies are registered at their accountants/lawyers, or they are highly paid contractors who earn enough to afford accommodation in WC2. East-central London is the location of nearly all the computer companies I know in London.
Census of general purpose computers installed in the 1960s
In the 1960s a small number of computer manufacturers sold a relatively small number of general purpose computers (IBM dominated the market). Between 1962 and 1974 the magazine Computers and Automation published a monthly census listing the total number of installed, and unfilled orders for, general purpose computers. A pdf of all the scanned census data is available on Bitsavers.
Over the last 10-years, I have made sporadic attempts to convert the data in this pdf to csv form. The available tools do a passable job of generating text, but the layout of the converted text is often very different from the visible layout presented by a pdf viewer. This difference is caused by the pdf2text tools outputting characters in the order in which they occur within the pdf. For example, if a pdf viewer shows the following text, with numbers showing the relative order of characters within the pdf file:
1 2 6
3 7
4 5 8 |
the output from pdf2text might be one of the four possibilities:
1 2 1 2 1 1
3 3 2 2
4 5 4 3 3
6 5 4 5 4
7 6 6 5
8 7 7 6
8 8 7
8 |
One cause of the difference is the algorithm pdf2text uses to decide whether characters occur on the same line, i.e., do they have the same vertical position on the same page, measured in points (
inch, or ≈ 0.353 mm)?
When a pdf is created by an application, characters on the same visual line usually have the same vertical position, and the extracted output follows a regular pattern. It’s just a matter of moving characters to the appropriate columns (editor macros to the rescue). Missing table entries complicate the process.
The computer census data comes from scanned magazines, and the vertical positions of characters on the same visual line are every so slightly different. This vertical variation effectively causes pdf2text to output the discrete character sequences on a variety of different lines.
A more sophisticated line assignment algorithm is needed. For instance, given the x/y position of each discrete character sequence, a fuzzy matching algorithm could assign the most likely row and column to each sequence.
The mupdf tool has an option to generate html, and this html contains the page/row/column values for each discrete character sequence, and it is possible to use this information to form reasonably laid out text. Unfortunately, the text on the scanned pages is not crisply sharp and mupdf produces o instead of 0, and l not 1, on a regular basis; too often for me to be interested in manually correctly the output.
Tesseract is the ocr tool of choice for many, and it supports the output of bounding box information. Unfortunately, running this software regularly causes my Linux based desktop to reboot.
I recently learned about Amazon’s Textract service, and tried it out. The results were impressive. Textract doesn’t just map characters to their position on the visible page, it is capable of joining multiple rows within a column and will insert empty strings if a column/row does not contain any characters. For instance, in the following image of the top of a page:
the column names are converted to "NAME OF MANUFACTURER","NAME OF COMPUTER", etc., and the empty first column/row are mapped to "".
The conversion is not quiet 100% accurate, but then the input is not 100% accurate; a few black smudges are treated as a single-quote or decimal point, and comma is sometimes treated as a fullstop. There were around 20 such mistakes in 11,000+ rows of numbers/names. There were six instances where two lines were merged into a single row, when the lines should have each been a separate row.
Having an essentially accurate conversion to csv available, does not remove the need for data cleaning. The image above contains two examples of entries that need to be corrected: the first column specifies that it is a continuation of a column on the previous page (over 12 different abbreviated forms of continued are used) Honeywell (cont'd) -> Honeywell, and other pages use a slightly different name for a particular computer DATA-matic 1000 -> Datamatic 1000. There are 350+ cleaning edits in my awk script that catch most issues (code+data).
How useful is this data?
Early computer census data in csv form is very rare, and now lots of it is available. My immediate use is completing a long-standing dataset conversion.
Obtaining the level of detail in this census, on a monthly basis, requires some degree of cooperation from the manufacturer. June 1967 appears to be the last time that IBM supplied detailed information, and later IBM census entries are listed as round estimates (and only for a few models).
The plot below shows the growth in the number of IBM 360 installations, for various models (unfilled orders date back to May 1964; code+data):
A paper to forget about
Papers describing vacuous research results get published all the time. Sometimes they get accepted at premier conferences, such as ICSE, and sometimes they even win a distinguished paper award, such as this one appearing at ICSE 2024.
If the paper Breaking the Flow: A Study of Interruptions During Software Engineering Activities had been produced by a final year PhD student, my criticism of them would be scathing. However, it was written by an undergraduate student, Yimeng Ma, who has just started work on a Masters. This is an impressive piece of work from an undergraduate.
The main reasons I am impressed by this paper as the work of an undergraduate, but would be very derisive of it as a work of a final year PhD student are:
- effort: it takes a surprisingly large amount of time to organise and run an experiment. Undergraduates typically have a few months for their thesis project, while PhD students have a few years,
- figuring stuff out: designing an experiment to test a hypothesis using a relatively short amount of subject time, recruiting enough subjects, the mechanics of running an experiment, gathering the data and then analysing it. An effective experimental design looks very simply, but often takes a lot of trial and error to create; it’s a very specific skill set that takes time to acquire. Professors often use students who attend one of their classes, but undergraduates have no such luxury, they need to be resourceful and determined,
- data analysis: the data analysis uses the appropriate modern technique for analyzing this kind of experimental data, i.e., a random effects model. Nearly all academic researchers in software engineering fail to use this technique; most continue to follow the herd and use simplistic techniques. I imagine that Yimeng Ma simply looked up the appropriate technique on a statistics website and went with it, rather than experiencing social pressure to do what everybody else does,
- writing a paper: the paper is well written and the style looks correct (I’m not an expert on ICSE paper style). Every field converges on a common style for writing papers, and there are substyles for major conferences. Getting the style correct is an important component of getting a paper accepted at a particular conference. I suspect that the paper’s other two authors played a major role in getting the style correct; or, perhaps there is now a language model tuned to writing papers for the major software conferences.
Why was this paper accepted at ICSE?
The paper is well written, covers a subject of general interest, involves an experiment, and discusses the results numerically (and very positively, which every other paper does, irrespective of their values).
The paper leaves out many of the details needed to understand what is going on. Those who volunteer their time to review papers submitted to a conference are flooded with a lot of work that has to be completed relatively quickly, i.e., before the published paper acceptance date. Anybody who has not run experiments (probably a large percentage of reviewers), and doesn’t know how to analyse data using non-simplistic techniques (probably most reviewers) are not going to be able to get a handle on the (unsurprising) results in this paper.
The authors got lucky by not being assigned reviewers who noticed that it’s to be expected that more time will be needed for a 3-minute task when the subject experiences an on-screen interruption, and even more time when for an in-person interruption, or that the p-values in the last column of Table 3 (0.0053, 0.3522, 0.6747) highlight the meaningless of the ‘interesting’ numbers listed
In a year or two, Yimeng Ma will be embarrassed by the mistakes in this paper. Everybody makes mistakes when they are starting out, but few get to make them in a paper that wins an award at a major conference. Let’s forget this paper.
Those interested in task interruption might like to read (unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of the data is publicly available): Task Interruption in Software Development Projects: What Makes some Interruptions More Disruptive than Others?
Finding reports and papers on the web
What is the best way to locate a freely downloadable copy of a report or paper on the web? The process I follow is outlined below (if you are new to this, you should first ask yourself whether reading a scientific paper will produce the result you are expecting):
- Google search. For the last 20 years, my experience is that Google search is the best place to look first.
Search on the title enclosed in double-quotes; if no exact matches are returned, the title you have may be slightly incorrect (variations in the typos of citations have been used to construct researcher cut-and-paste genealogies, i.e., authors copying a citation from a paper into their own work, rather than constructing one from scratch or even reading the paper being cited). Searching without quotes may return the desired result, or lots of unrelated matched. In the unrelated matches case, quote substrings within the title or include the first author’s surname.
The search may return a link to a ResearchGate page without a download link. There may be a “Request full-text” link. Clicking this sends a request email to one of the authors (assuming ResearchGate has an address), who will often respond with a copy of the paper.
A search may not return any matches, or links to copies that are freely available. Move to the next stage,
- Google Scholar. This is a fantastic resource. This site may link to a freely downloadable copy, even though a Google search does not. It may also return a match, even though a Google search does not. Most of the time, it is not necessary to include the title in quotes.
If the title matches a paper without displaying a link to a downloaded pdf, click on the match’s “Cited by” link (assuming it has one). The author may have published a later version that is available for download. If the citation count is high, tick the “Search within citing articles” box and try narrowing the search. For papers more than about five years old, you can try a “Customer range…” to remove more recent citations.
No luck? Move to the next stage,
- If a freely downloadable copy is available on the web, why doesn’t Google link to it?
A website may have a robots.txt requesting that the site not be indexed, or access to report/paper titles may be kept in a site database that Google does not access.
Searches now either need to be indirect (e.g., using Google to find an author web page, which may contain the sought after file), or targeted at specific cases.
It’s now all special cases. Things to try:
- Author’s website. Personal web pages are common for computing-related academics (much less common for non-computing, especially business oriented), but often a year or two out of date. Academic websites usually show up on a Google search. For new (i.e., less than a year), when you don’t need to supply a public link to the paper, email the authors asking for a copy. Most are very happy that somebody is interested in their work, and will email a copy.
When an academic leaves a University, their website is quickly removed (MIT is one of the few that don’t do this). If you find a link to a dead site, the Wayback Machine is the first place to check (try less recent dates first). Next, the academic may have moved to a new University, so you need to find it (and hope that the move is not so new that they have not yet created a webpage),
- Older reports and books. The Internet Archive is a great resource,
- Journals from the 1950s/1960s, or computer manuals. bitsavers.org is the first place to look,
- Reports and conference proceedings from before around 2000. It might be worth spending a few £/$ at a second hand book store; I use Amazon, AbeBooks, and Biblio. Despite AbeBooks being owned by Amazon, availability/pricing can vary between the two,
- A PhD thesis? If you know the awarding university, Google search on ‘university-name “phd thesis”‘ to locate the appropriate library page. This page will probably include a search function; these search boxes sometimes supporting ‘odd’ syntax, and you might have to search on: surname date, keywords, etc. Some universities have digitized thesis going back to before 1900, others back to 2000, and others to 2010.
The British Library has copies of thesis awarded by UK universities, and they have digitized thesis going back before 2000,
- Accepted at a conference. A paper accepted at a conference that has not yet occurred, maybe available in preprint form; otherwise you are going to have to email the author (search on the author names to find their university/GitHub webpage and thence their email),
- Both CiteSeer and then Semantic Scholar were once great resources. These days, CiteSeer has all but disappeared, and Semantic Scholar seems to mostly link to publisher sites and sometimes to external sites.
Dead-tree search techniques are a topic for history books.
More search suggestions welcome.
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