How far can a language model improve under a strict artifact budget? Parameter Golf posed this question as an open community challenge in which participants trained the best language model, with the complete artifact (training code + compressed weights) required to fit within 16 MB and to be trained in under ten minutes on 8xH100 SXM GPUs. Quality was measured in bits-per-byte (BPB), the average number of bits required to encode each byte of unseen text. We analyze 2,037 pull requests and 1,430 clean-scored submissions from the contest, build a taxonomy of 84 optimization techniques, and measure each technique's contribution to BPB. The verified leaderboard score dropped from 1.2244 to 1.058 BPB across three phases, a 13.6% reduction, despite individual techniques rarely improving BPB by more than 1%. We show that most techniques' gains shrink when re-measured among competitive submissions, isolating the few methods that help regardless of the surrounding stack. Code and data are available at https://github.com/PMP56/pmgolf-analysis.
This publication proposes a definition and a classification of agile software development approaches and analyses ten software development methods that can be characterized as being "agile" against the defined criterion.
P. Abrahamsson, O. Salo, Jussi Ronkainen et al.· arXiv.org· 727 citations· ⚡54
Consequences of happiness and unhappiness that are beneficial and detrimental for developers' mental well-being, the software development process, and the produced artifacts are found.
D. Graziotin, Fabian Fagerholm, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 236 citations· ⚡13
The Mobile-D approach is briefly outlined here and the experiences gained from four case studies are discussed, which helped develop an agile development approach for mobile application development.
P. Abrahamsson, Antti Hanhineva, H. Hulkko et al.· Conference on Object-Oriente...· 225 citations· ⚡18
GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of such models.
Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al.· arXiv.org· 216 citations· ⚡17
A study with 42 participants investigates the relationship between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving skills of software developers and offers support for the claim that happy developers are indeed better problem solvers in terms of their analytical abilities.
D. Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson· PeerJ· 216 citations· ⚡13
This state-of-practice investigation was performed using a literature review followed by a multiple-case study approach and presents how inconsistency between managerial strategies and execution can lead to failure by means of a behavioral framework.
Carmine Giardino, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson· International Conference on...· 175 citations· ⚡19
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