Software Development: State Of The Art Vs. State Of The Practice

The state of the art of software development has changed considerably from the folkloric approaches of the 1950s and 60s. But has the state of the practice kept up? A commonly held (rather cynical) view is that the great revolutions associated with the names of Dijkstra, Wirth, Mills, Hoare, Parnas, Myers and others might as well not have happened for all the effect they had on the practice of the average developer. During the years 1984 through 1987, the authors conducted a series of performance benchmarking exercises to allow individuals and organizations to evaluate their relative productivity. The emphasis of the benchmarks was on speed of program construction and low defect rate. A side-effect of the exercise was that nearly 400 programmers wrote the same program (they all wrote to the same specification) and sent in listings of these programs along with their questionnaires, time logs, and test results. This afforded an opportunity to assess design and coding practice of a wide sample of developers.