alt Hacker News> There are parts of product development that are non-chaotic, and SPC works just fine there, too.
Not to detract from your main point, but being non-chaotic is still not enough for SPC to work. Almost all of development tasks have thick-tailed time distributions, even if one is perfectly capable of analyzing them, they are not controllable.
I disagree. Where I have worked, these important quantities have appeared thin-tailed:
- Size of pull requests (due to feedback loops)
- Effort required for bug fixes (the variation is large, but not a power law)
- Developer-hours in a sprint (this might seem obvious but it is still useful!)
- Weekly code complexity increase (counted as lines of code added)
- Fraction of effort spent on paying off technical debt
- Time taken by CI
- Weekly count of deployments
- Number of commits in a deployment
There are many more, but this should be enough to illustrate that software product development is not only subexponential.