By the way, has anyone studied any real programmers, yet? [software development process]

What more should we be doing to better understand process? I believe that we should observe professional software developers in their organizations. We should study what they do, and then build productive theories (a theory that addresses some important and significantly defensible explanation for the phenomena) to explain why they are doing what we observe. Finally, we should refine these theories by demonstrating and confirming our hypotheses through sequences of experiments.