Re: Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard

From: Trevor L. Jackson, III (tlj3_at_comcast.net)
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 15:32:07 -0500

jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:

> In article <hoWdnUarUOeZK4PfRVn-qA@comcast.com>,
> "Trevor L. Jackson, III" <tlj3@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>>David Wagner wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>>The first experiment of which I am aware occurred at a university (I'd
>>like to provide a reference, but this was almost 30 years go). They
>>measured the productivity of their CS students on a standardized
>>development project. The project was small, but certainly not trivial.
>> The students were not beginners, but had enough coding experience that
>>the project was not supposed to be a learning experience. It was
>>supposed to be an execution test. The results showed a factor of 200 in
>>productivity rates across the student population. (Now I need to go find
>>the reference because there was something interesting about the
>>distribution of the productivity ratios, but I don't remember what it
>
> was).
>
> [poking emoticon here] I'm interested.

I haven't found it yet, but I did remember parts of it. The
distribution was lumpy. One lump was small, < 20%, but represented
students who took a huge amount of time to complete the task, and thus
represented a very low productivity.

Apparently academic curricula emphasize correctness over personal
performance (an approach I support). But some of the testers ocmments
led me to believe that they were surprised about some of the people who
just were not productive at all.

Another, smaller lump was essentially off-the-chart, and represented a
tail for whch the test was not meaningful. Those two subsamples
accounted for the extreme width of the ratio.

The central lump was uninteresting except that it had not idetifiable
mode od peak, being a quite noisy plateau with some foothills. The
commentary indicated that this was attributable to the small sample
(<100 IIRC).

I think the source may have been a Canadian school. Still don't have it
in hand.

>
> <snip>
>
>>>And I suspect the security community could benefit from placing more
>>>effort on measurement.
>>
>>Definitely. But there's this tiny little problem: what are the units by
>>which we measure (in)security? I've asked this question before.
>
>
> This isn't going to help w.r.t. security but we used a swear metric.
> If your users are swearing a lot then you've got lots of work left
> to do. Computers can make grey-haired, church-going ladies, who
> have never sworn in their lives, become raving maniacs with a
> vocabulary of longshoremen.

How to handle cursing users: Immediate action necessary. Visit their
cubicle and ask them, in a humorous tone to tell you how they _really_
feel. If that gets a chuckle, deal with the actual software problems.
It if trigers even more ranting consider it cathartic ventilation and
schedule a (later) time to review the problems. If it triggers sudden
silence with a fixed stare at you, back slowly out of the subicle, flee
to your office, send the person email giving them tomorrow off, and
consider assigning their responsibilites to someone else.

Minds can be damaged and sometimes broken by bad software. It happens
in usability labs on a regular basis.

/tj3

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