
Are Delayed Issues Harder to Resolve? [pdf] - johnm
https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.04886
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johnm
"Abstract Many practitioners and academics believe in a delayed issue effect
(DIE); i.e. the longer an issue lingers in the system, the more effort it
requires to resolve. This belief is often used to justify major investments in
new development processes that promise to retire more issues sooner.

This paper tests for the delayed issue effect in 171 software projects
conducted around the world in the period from 2006–2014. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the largest study yet published on this effect. We found no
evidence for the delayed issue effect; i.e. the effort to resolve issues in a
later phase was not consistently or substantially greater than when issues
were resolved soon after their introduction. This paper documents the above
study and explores reasons for this mismatch between this common rule of thumb
and empirical data.

In summary, DIE is not some constant across all projects. Rather, DIE might be
an historical relic that occurs intermittently only in certain kinds of
projects. This is a significant result since it predicts that new development
processes that promise to faster retire more issues will not have a guaranteed
return on investment (depending on the context where applied), and that a
long-held truth in software engineering should not be considered a global
truism."

