The Correlation Principle | #83

The correlation principle says that our productivity is tightly correlated with the internal quality of software. The two go up together, and they go down together, and you can't trade away the one to get more of the other. The basic idea of the correlation premise is actually pretty simple, but when we introduce it, we generally get a chorus of yabbits. ("Yeah, but...") There are several confusions common to most of that chorus, so let's look at them one at a time. Confusion: mixing up internal software quality and external software quality. The yabbit takes this form: "Yeah, but we can get it done faster if we settle for it working less well." See, here's the thing: that's generally true. We *can* deliver more quickly by settling for a lower level of value. The trick is to understand the yabbit as being about *external* software quality, not *internal* software quality.

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