Awareness of the consequences of right-skewed effort and productivity distributions in software development

The available evidence suggests that many characteristics of software development are not symmetrically distributed but follow a right-skewed distribution, meaning that their value distributions have a long tail toward higher values. This right-skew may have important consequences for the effective management of software development work. In this paper, we focus on two right-skewed distributions relevant to software management processes, i.e., the right-skewed distributions of software development effort usage and productivity, and software professionals' awareness of important consequences of the right-skew. Our analysis, which is based on data from four empirical studies with software professionals, reveals that although most software professionals are aware of the right-skew of these two distributions, they may not fully appreciate several of the important management consequences of it. This includes its consequences for the communication of effort estimates, for the use of correct methods for adding effort estimates, and for team productivity. We argue that increasing the awareness of the management consequences of right-skewed distributions among software professionals may play a role in the improvement of software development management.