The Leprechauns of Software Engineering

The software profession has a problem, widely recognized but which nobody seems willing to do anything about; a variant of the well known ""telephone game,"" where some trivial rumor is repeated from one person to the next until it has become distorted beyond recognition and blown up out of all proportion. Unfortunately, the objects of this telephone game are generally considered cornerstone truths of the discipline, to the point that their acceptance now seems to hinder further progress. This book takes a look at some of those ""ground truths"" the claimed 10x variation in productivity between developers; the ""software crisis""; the cost-of-change curve; the ""cone of uncertainty""; and more. It assesses the real weight of the evidence behind these ideas - and confronts the scary prospect of moving the state of the art forward in a discipline that has had the ground kicked from under it.

What Hacker News says

CodeMageOct 2026

Although "lies" might be too strong a word, I agree with you that the the AI-is-the-future people haven't done nearly enough to prove their claims. But that's nothing new in our industry, really.

I would recommend "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering" by Laurent Bossavit for an insightful and entertaining overview of just how much of software "engineering" is based on "truths" that we don't question.

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bklaasenJan 2023

Terrific, thanks. That's new to me.

Laurent Bossavit's "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering"[1] is fun and accessible. It claims that much of what we consider fact in software engineering is actually folklore.

[1] https://leanpub.com/leprechauns/

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bklaasenJul 2021

Not, computer science, but Laurent Bossavit's "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering" covers exactly that: folklore that has mutated into fact. 10x programmers, the cost of change curve and more. Terrific read.

https://leanpub.com/leprechauns

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tdeckJul 2021

Somewhat related: I enjoyed reading the eBook "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering" by Laurent Bossavit [1]. The author tried to track down the source research behind various pieces of received wisdom. I remember that the claimed cost of fixing bugs at a later stage was one of them.

[1]: https://leanpub.com/leprechauns

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tibbettsJul 2021

I enjoyed the book _Leprechauns of Software Engineering_ which did track down all the chains of citations to find where the original work was misunderstood or even nonexistent. I would bet that it covers most or even all of these citations, but I’m not taking the time to pull it out and cross reference. https://leanpub.com/leprechauns

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jdlshoreMay 2021

I’m not so sure about that book. It includes Steve McConnell’s claims about 10x productivity, which Laurent Bossavit thouroughly and convincingly debunked in his book, The Leprechauns of Software Engineering.

A bunch of citations isn’t the same as evidence. When I dig into software studies, I find all kinds of issues, ranging from subjects of convenience (the professor used their undergrad class for their study) to industry studies that don’t define their terms. (e.g., MS did a large empirical study of TDD, but never defined how TDD was practiced—this is relevant given the misunderstandings of TDD that exist, particularly at Microsoft).

I didn’t read the rest of the book—just looked at the blurb, winced at the inclusion of McConnell repeating his 10x claim, and read his chapter—but my default stance is to be highly skeptical of academic software engineering, and even more skeptical of popularizations.

Edit: I’ve just glanced through OP’s book, and it looks like an impressive piece of scholarship. I remain skeptical of academia’s ability to teach much of interest regarding software engineering, though. (They spend a lot of words on Waterfall and traditional project management. Their words on the Agile-kinda stuff companies actually use today? One paragraph, paraphrased: “there is no data, we have nothing to say.” Not the authors’ fault, but sums up the irrelevance of academia to real-world SE, in my mind.)

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