Accelerating learning from experience: avoiding defects faster

All programmers learn from experience. A few are rather fast at it and learn to avoid repeating mistakes after once or twice. Others are slower and repeat mistakes hundreds of times. Most programmers' behavior falls somewhere in between: They reliably learn from their mistakes, but the process is slow and tedious. The probability of making a structurally similar mistake again decreases slightly during each of some dozen repetitions. Because of this a programmer often takes years to learn a certain rule-positive or negative-about his or her behavior. As a result, programmers might turn to the personal software process (PSP) to help decrease mistakes. We show how to accelerate this process of learning from mistakes for an individual programmer, no matter whether learning is currently fast, slow, or very slow, through defect logging and defect data analysis (DLDA) techniques.