What's the most interesting/surprising Software Engineering metric you know? For example, I find that "50% of all projects are considered failures" is quite frightening.
+1
A:
Caper Jones, in an unpublished 1977 study for IBM, found that the very best developers are much more productive than the worst programmer -- when working on small projects. The best developer will complete a 1k line of code (LOC) effort 6 times faster than the lousiest. The productivity delta falls to 2x on a 64k LOC project. Beyond a few hundred thousand LOC both sorts of people perform equally well. Or equally poorly.
Dingo
2010-10-23 19:43:27