The Contribution of the Cardboard Cutout Dog to Software Reliability and Maintainability.
It's generally the act of trying to understand why you wrote something in a particular way (in order that you can coherently explain it) that leads you to the inescapable conclusion that it's a load of male bovine excrement and that you'd better rewrite that part.
It's also noticable that the co-worker to whom you are explaining will lose track of your explanation approximately 30 seconds into your four hour performance, and after just under two minutes will be in a mental state best approximated by the term 'catatonic'. What Can We Learn From This? Since the person being walked though the code is catatonic - there is no particular need to tie up an expensive engineering professional. We first experimented with walking through code with secretarial staff, management, office cleaners and various other staff at our facility. We also tried to hire consultants on an hourly basis to perform this function.
Table 1. Walkthroughee Attention Span Distraction Feedback Cost Engineer 30 seconds 10% 2% $30/hour Consultant 20 seconds 15% 1% $200/hour Secretary 14 hours 98% 1% $20/hour (NOTE 1) Middle Manager 20 seconds 85% 1% $50/hour Senior Manager 0.64 picoseconds 118% 1% $100/hour (NOTE 2) Office Cleaner 10 minutes 50% 11% $10/hour Restroom Attendant 8 minutes 50% 14% $5/hour Note 1: "My computer crashes like that too". Note 2: "Can't we work smarter - not harder"
