“Matters Canadian” and the Problem with Being Special: Robert T. Frederick on the First Special Service Force

On 12 July 1942, the Canadian Army authorized the movement of nearly seven hundred officers and men to the United States for training as part of the First Special Service Force (FSSF), a highly-specialized commando unit that was being organized for the purpose of conducting raids in the alpine regions of occupied Europe. From the summer of 1942 until disbandment in December 1944, this combined “North American” force consisted of soldiers drawn from the armies of both Canada and the United States. From the Aleutian Islands, to Monte la Difensa, Rome, and ending in Southern France, the élite US-Canadian infantry brigade established a remarkable combat record and became a symbol of the lasting partnership between our two countries. Today, the First Special Service Force is remembered both in Canada and the United States for its outstanding achievements in combat as well as its unique, bi-national composition. Prior to 1942, Canadian soldiers had never served in such close association with the US Army, and even the post-war era has seen no similar examples of such near-complete integration. Within the Force, Canadian and American soldiers wore the same uniforms, carried the same weapons, and answered to the same superiors regardless of nationality—an American private could take orders from a Canadian sergeant, who in turn answered to an American or Canadian lieutenant. At the top of this bi-national chain of command stood Robert T. Frederick, US Army, the man who organized and led the First Special Service Force from its activation on 2 July 1942 until his departure on 23 June 1944, shortly after Rome fell to the Allies

Are Delayed Issues Harder to Resolve? Revisiting Cost-to-Fix of Defects throughout the Lifecycle

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.Comment: 31 pages. Accepted with minor revisions to Journal of Empirical Software Engineering. Keywords: software economics, phase delay, cost to fi

Book Reviews

Lhasa and its Mysteries by L. Austine Waddell; Peaks and Lamas by Marco Pallis; Tibetan Medicine illustrated in original texts by Rechung Rinpoche Jampal Kunzan