Where are the "Coding War Games" tasks from Peopleware?

Question

In Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister write about the "Coding War Games", which was a project they ran between 1984 and 1986 (possibly longer) to help assess individual and workplace productivity. Each task was a small-to-medium sized independent program which could be implemented in any programming language.

My question: where are these tasks? They're not obviously indexed by Google and they don't seem to be available from DeMarco and Lister's company (http://www.systemsguild.com/).

More broadly, is there anything similar to this today that a motivated person could use to get a productivity self-assessment? And if not, who's going to help me create one?

Answer 1

I don't know if you can get what you want for free, but you could look at Project Euler. The problems are mathematical in nature, but after you answer the question you get access to a discussion about the problem and it is interesting to see the different approaches that other people take to solve it.

In terms of measurement, you won't be able to see actual time taken to solve the problem but you would be able to look at lines of code and readability easily. Anything performance related would require a bit more work on your part.

Answer 2

The "Coding War Games" projects are most likely protected by copyright so you will probably have to buy the book to get them.

As far as something similar, there are the ACM ICPC problem sets, click on "Browse Problems" and then choose a volume, the site has a couple thousand problems of varying difficulty. The problems are not geared toward any particular programming language and you can submit solutions to be automatically judged in several languages. You might also want to check out the Match Archives at TopCoder.

Answer 3

The small tasks on Topcoder are quite interesting. But they are more a kind of mental exercise and don't necessarily teach about good software development. However they are often fun and teach coding attentively to get it right on the first try.

Answer 4

As per the book, the definition (task) should be of 1 to 2 man month in size. And it is better if it is the project which your company has already done or have been working on frequently. Obviously it should not be same definition, it should have few interesting stuff also.

I am going to hold this event in coming weekend and here are conditions I have set (mostly taken from the book).

I have a challenge to find such a definition which will work for ASP.NET, VB.NET and PHP teams.