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Everybody's Talking, but Nobody's Saying Much
Here's a picture of three men from West Virginia holding a giant rattlesnake. It's been all over the web and the news. It turns out the snake isn't giant, the men aren't from West Virginia, and the story is bogus. WTF? How about separating anecdotal evidence from reality?
People love telling stories. How about the parents who hired a stripper for their son's birthday part? (true story) Or the movers who found a live grenade in a woman's couch in Alabama? (also a true story) But at some point hearsay and stories have to lead to something more tangible, especially if you're the person that's supposed to be making decisions.
In a software shop, it usually goes like this: testing says the developers are too stupid to be programmers, the developers rail on about how the requirements must have been created by trained monkeys, and the requirements guys, well, you don't want to hear what they think about management. Everbody's got a story. Everybody's got a point of view.
Sometimes people come with interesting stories in order to make a point, like the parrot who understood what the concept of zero is. "Hey. If they can teach parrots to count, couldn't we get some of them in here? They're bound to better than these morons." or some such.
In computers, especially, over-engineering is a way of life. When we're faced with the "anecdotal problem" a lot of us will reach for the metrics book. Applying the slide rule to the organization, we're looking for the min-max points on the graph. But are people really that simple to understand?
Here's an idea. If you want to know how something is going, why don't you just ask the people?
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