Four Groups Blog

Philip Preissing talks about some fascinating research from Microsoft in which the outcome of software projects reflects and is very heavily influenced by the organisational structure in which they were conceived and developed. Building in part on Conway’s Law, a study of Window’s Vista said;

They evaluated their metrics on the Codebase of Windows Vista (over 3400 Binaries, >50 Million Lines of Code, thousands of developers) with very astonishing results. They tried to estimate which binaries of Vista would have a fault in the field (are failure-prone) and which are not failure-prone. 86.2% of the predicted failure-prone binaries were actually failure-prone (precision) and 84% of all actual failure-prone binaries were correctly predicted (recall)… As it can be seen, the organizational structure metrics out-performed every other metric in terms of precision as well as recall!

I suspect there may be more lessons to come from such work and it may well apply to fields beyond software development.