Assessing Practitioner Beliefs about Software Engineering

TL;DR

This study evaluates five longstanding beliefs in software engineering about developer productivity, quality, and experience, revealing limited support and emphasizing the need for ongoing empirical reassessment of industry assumptions.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the validity of five traditional beliefs in software engineering, highlighting the influence of programming languages and advocating for continuous belief reevaluation.

Findings

Support found for only one belief: "Quality entails productivity"

No clear support for four other beliefs related to programming languages and developer experience

Programming languages act as confounding factors affecting productivity and quality

Abstract

Software engineering is a highly dynamic discipline. Hence, as times change, so too might our beliefs about core processes in this field. This paper checks some five beliefs that originated in the past decades that comment on the relationships between (i) developer productivity; (ii) software quality and (iii) years of developer experience. Using data collected from 1,356 developers in the period 1995 to 2006, we found support for only one of the five beliefs titled "Quality entails productivity". We found no clear support for four other beliefs based on programming languages and software developers. However, from the sporadic evidence of the four other beliefs we learned that a narrow scope could delude practitioners in misinterpreting certain effects to hold in their day to day work. Lastly, through an aggregated view of assessing the five beliefs, we find programming languages act as a confounding factor for developer productivity and software quality. Thus the overall message of this work is that it is both important and possible to revisit old beliefs in SE. Researchers and practitioners should routinely retest old beliefs.