What the F-86 can teach us about software development (opens in new tab)

What a joke.

http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/0316...

Details here (in the main text and in cited materials):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-86_Sabre#Korean_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiG-15#Operational_history

Isolating success in dogfights to flight controls seems like a gross oversimplification. I would like to see the original source for this (attributed to Boyd in the article).

While tiring would be a factor, even if completely fresh, you can simply move a lesser weight (force) faster than a larger one.

Second problem is that there were multiple differences between MiGs and Sabres - the one I always heard was most significant, back when I was a teen, is that Sabres were better constructed, MiGs were more likely to fall apart from relatively light damage. So don't take any single article or viewpoint as the truth - reality is always more complex than will fit into a article or book.

My partner and I tweaked it's understanding of how to evaluate board positions to eek out better playing ability, but the major improvements came from implementing a more efficient specialized game tree that let us calculate another move ahead every decision.

Having one more "loop" made a huge difference against our opponents; being simply smarter or better at any of the "steps in the loop" didn't help nearly as much.

I am guesssing what that means is it's the tools and not the process. The process is subconscious. The tools that we use, determine how fast we can iterate. Take RoR for example, or Visual Basic(F5 anyone?), developers could iterate rapidly and after a while the process faded away, but the tools remained. Maybe, developers need to play with new toys instead of following new processes.