Re:Ask HN: Teach me something new
by ZeroGravitas on Saturday April 30, 2022 @07:20AM
(#31215118)
One of the rules of thumb of process management is to reduce the median, rather than the average time taken, because outliers are more likely to have one-off causes and so be harder to fix systematically. In fact, attempts to fix outliers can be a distraction and even net negative.
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Interesting. I wonder if that applies in SW dev though. In standard processes each correctly produced item satisfies a customer, but for sw dev individual tasks are internal and customers only care about the final outcome.
Also standard processes normally involve Gaussian distributions, so large deviations are rare and can be called outliers, but software estimation has fat tailed or bimodal distributions, so large deviations are part of the standard order of business.