Laws

There are a wonderful list of laws in software development.

Some of my favourites are:

• Parkinson’s law.
• Murphy’s law.
• Gilb’s law and Goodhart’s law go hand in hand.

All of the listed laws I have linked to are good to know of and some are quite scary.

I am missing one law though, and that is Little’s Law about queuing. For instance in agile it could be used to manage workflow.

Example

Imagine an Agile team working on a project:

• They have an average WIP of 10 tasks (L = 10).
• They complete 2 tasks per week (λ = 2 tasks/week).
• Using Little’s Law: 10 = 2 × W, so W = 5 weeks.

This means the average cycle time for a task is 5 weeks.

To improve they either need to reduce WIP, assuming the throughput stays the same. Or increase throughput by becoming more effective.

Read for you self: The 13 software engineering laws - by Anton Zaides