Overtime

This weekend our department is hosting the 2011 Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS).  This symposium brings together computer science students and faculty from across the upper Midwest for programming and robotics competitions and paper presentations.

Friday morning during the paper presentations, a colleague and I presented our paper titled Overtime Effects on Project Team Effectiveness.  In this paper we discussed the impacts scheduling and extended overtime pressures have on the project team; particularly software designers and software developers.  In researching this paper I found a study showing that 75% of software faults occur in the design phase and 71% of faults result in long-term stress factors such as short development timelines, human error, and skipping steps in the methodology.  The causes of these errors are not surprising but it is rather surprising to see the highest level of faults occurring in the design phase rather than in the development phase.

Later this week the proceedings from the conference will be published.  I'll post a link once they are available.