Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!umich!yale!mintaka!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!jon
From: jon@cs.washington.edu (Jon Jacky)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Japanese software developement (was: OOP and estimating)
Summary: Japanese software development not as formidable as claimed
Message-ID: <12480@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 6 Jul 90 17:48:38 GMT
References: <30852@cup.portal.com> <102100011@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <5241@stpstn.UUCP> <5288@stpstn.UUCP>
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 78

A recent posting in this newsgroup reported some impressive findings about
Japanese software development practices and performance.   I have other news
from Japan that presents a different view.

Here is the excerpt from the original posting by Brad Cox (cox@stpstn.UUCP):

> You might be interested in how certain organizations are managing to beat
> our butts in terms of quality and time to market by *one to two orders
> of magnitude).
> 
>	Average of 2-3 programmers per terminal
>
>	Obsolete software technologies (assembler often)
>
>	200-300 desks per room, side by side, managers at the end of each
>	row.
>
>	Workdays average 10-14 hours/day.
>
> The organization is, of course, a Japanese software development
> organization such as Hitachi, NEC, etc.  These are a quick summary from
> memory of a workshop organized by Victor Basili and Colonel Will Stackhouse
> at Univ. of Md on Tuesday of this week.

I forwarded this posting to a friend of mine, a graduate student in computer
science who is spending the summer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology,
studying Japanese software development practices.  He in turn forwarded the
message to a colleague who works at Hitachi.  Here is that colleague's
response:

------------------

I'd like to ask are Japanese really beating US on software development.
My current is "no."  Even if we focus on the productivity of Japanese
programmers, often I hear the estimate of 10 lines (high-level
programming language) of debugged code per day per programmer.

Here is my feedback on the claims made:

	Average of 2-3 programmers per terminal
		--- This situation is no longer true.

	Obsolete software technologies (assembler often)
		--- Assembler?  You gotta be kidding.
		    At any rate, they are agressively importing
		    software development tools.

	200-300 desks per room, side by side, managers at the end of each
	row.
		--- This is physically impossible.  How big a room do
		    you need to fit 200 to 300 desk per room?

	Workdays average 10-14 hours/day.
		--- Yeah.  Regardless whether you are Japanese or
		    non-Japanese, you tend to write codes that you
		    don't want to see the next day after working
		    14hurs.  Then how does longer working day add
		    to increase in productivity?  Also you need to
		    remember that fair number of these hourse are
		    spent on administrative tasks, much more so
		    than in US.

I don't have a good feel for the reliability of Japanese software, but
as far as their quality is concerned, I don't think they are well made.
Remember the quality is not just reliability but also includes the design
of the system.  In this area, I think they lag well behind.  The problem
analysis and solving ability of average Japanese programmers is not that
good in my opinion.

This is my assessment on the situation.  What I'd like to ask
this guy who wrote the original article is that if Japanese software
houses' quality is that good, why doesn't he just order out his
company's development to Japanese?  Wouldn't that make more business
sense?

(end of response from Japan)

- Jon Jacky, University of Washington, Seattle   jon@gaffer.rad.washington.edu