The Leprechauns of Software Engineering

Preface

Chapter 1: Software Engineering’s telephone game

1. How we got there
2. Surface plausibility
3. Leprechaun spotting
4. What you can do
5. An inspiring example

Chapter 2: The Cone of Uncertainty

1. How to feel foolish in front of a class
2. Making sense of the picture
3. Getting to the facts
4. The telephone game in action
5. Controversy
6. What to make of all this?

Chapter 3: Why you should care about empirical results

1. The perils of empirical research
2. Discipline envy
3. Science and reality
4. Where to go from here

Chapter 4: The messy workings of scientific discourse

1. Modalities
2. Citation as modality
3. The construction of facts

Chapter 5: The hunt for the 10x files

1. Why is this important? Isn’t it obvious?
2. The impressive list of references
3. The original study and the 10x claim
4. Harshly criticized
5. The 10x files
6. Good study, bad study
7. The wild goose chase

Chapter 6: The variable programmer

1. Getting just the results you want
2. Within-subject variability
3. Rocket science: the NASA data
4. Needle in a haystack
5. The COCOMO haystacks
6. Environmental effects
7. Summing up

Interlude: How To Lie

Chapter 7: Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Waterfall?

1. The standard story
2. Alternate endings
3. Just the facts
4. No paper is an island
5. Late bloomer
6. Birth of a myth

Chapter 8: Software’s perpetual crisis

Chapter 9: A Leprechaun hunting tutorial

Chapter 10: The cost of defects: an illustrated history

1. Origins
2. First amendments
3. Where’s the data?
4. Metamorphoses
5. Changing the topic altogether
6. Reading curves
7. Theory-laden diagrams
8. Boehm’s assent

Chapter 11: Rocket science and Flaubert math

1. Flaubert and the math of ROI
2. NASA IV&V’s math
3. How old is the captain?
4. Eighy-three! For some value of eighty-three.

Chapter 12: For some value of 56

1. Where bugs come from
2. Sample size of one
3. Poor requirements
4. A software triumph

Chapter 13: The cost of bad research

1. Uncritical thinking
2. Extraordinarily suspect claims
3. Terms of inquiry
4. Research standards

Chapter 14: Raising the bar

1. Two modest proposals for publications on software development
2. Will you take the pledge?

Chapter 15: A new model of inquiry

1. The Ouroboros effect: circular causation
2. From Requirements To Negotiation
3. The cliffhanger

Appendix A: bibliographical analysis of the 10x files

1. Questions of indirection
2. Summary results
3. The quest for primary sources
4. A better list: primary sources with empirical evidence

Appendix B: bibliographical analysis for the “defect-cost-increase curve”

1. The older references
2. The newer references

Appendix C - Conceptions and invention of waterfall

1. Invention of waterfall
2. Conceptions of waterfall (articles between 1970 and 1989)