Steve McConnell hosted a webinar that I think more people need to see.

We actually know a fair bit about how to create high-functioning, effective software development organizations. The knowledge exists but not enough teams are applying it.

So, if your team is struggling in any way or if you are trying to convince your manager to invest in better practices, this talk is well worth watching.

I’ll discuss some of the more interesting slides from these talks below.

Most developers have never been on a highly effective team

The red plot below shows the distribution of team effectiveness that most people expect–a normal, symmetric distribution. If this was the actual distribution, then by the time you’ve been on 5 or 6 teams you would expect that your experience would give you a feel for the “average” effectiveness for a software development team.

However, the actual distribution is the blue plot, which has a long tail to the right. The teams way out there on the right are extremely effective, but there’s so few of them that there’s very little chance the average developer has ever worked on one of those teams. In fact, the “average” developer is working on a pretty ineffective team, but most don’t know it.

People, People, People!!!

The importance of having excellent people cannot be overstated. The projects with the worst programmers will take 17 times longer to complete than the projects with the best programmers, all things equal. That’s assuming the project with the worst programmers can finish at all.

Software improvement initiatives can have a very high ROI

And they offer other benefits as well.

Where do the savings from improved processes and training come from?

Reduced rework!!!

Plus, reduced probability of project failure.

And raw speed, reduced testing, and maintenance effort (not shown in the charts).

Where to start

Hire top talent! 10x programmers are not a myth. In fact, my personal experience suggests that the difference between the best programmers and the worst is infinite because I get people applying for senior programmer positions who can’t pass a simple screening coding exercise, despite extensive industry experience.

Always work on the most important thing.

And, of course, everything Steve mentions in the following slides.

Wrapping up

I summarized the evidence supporting better software practices and where to start in my post “The ONE chart every developer MUST understand.”