Derek Jones writes data-driven critiques of software engineering research, covering effort estimation, compilers, language history and developer careers.
HN commenters cite it as skeptical evidence against common claims, such as the idea that software effort estimation research is mostly fake.
Stay in the field long enough and the number of anecdotes will grow so much that you will notice the pattern, unless your pet rock’s intelligence can surpass your own.
Also, hasn’t there been a link [0] just a couple days ago about how most of the “serious science research” done about software development estimation is based on datasets that are either smaller than the number of anecdotes a typical software developer will easily encounter in five years, or are right away made up? Just what kind of data would you expect, and from whom?
[0] https://shape-of-code.com/2021/01/17/software-effort-estimation-is-mostly-fake-research/
You might enjoy these three things on the topic of software development:
1. Derek Jones. (2021, January 17). Software effort estimation is mostly fake research. The Shape of Code. https://shape-of-code.com/2021/01/17/software-effort-estimation-is-mostly-fake-research/
2. Andy Oram, Greg Wilson, & Andrew Oram (Eds.). (2011). Making software: what really works, and why we believe it (1st ed). O’Reilly.
3. Bossavit, L. (2015). The leprechauns of software engineering: how folklore turns into fact and what to do about it. Leanpub.
I want to raise a point of order here.
We do not have any good research backing "bugs found later in the process cost more to fix".
If anything, the few empirical and solid dataset we have show no correlation, to at best really light one.
This principle may sound solid in theory, but the evidence is not here to support it and if anything seems to point to its invalidity.
See in particular
https://shape-of-code.com/2021/06/27/increase-in-defect-fixing-costs-with-distance-from-original-mistake/