Hopefully this is not regarded as off-topic here?
Recently there's been a bit of discussion about model threads, the selection of titles/names for them, and the role of MIR. What I want to suggest is that the MIR section, the people who participate here as a collaborative group, are generally more likely to produce more accurate and useful outcomes at the task of model identification than we each do when operating as individuals. Furthermore, that is true regardless of which individuals happen to be involved, i.e. it's not a product of some necessarily being "specialists" or "experts". Group trumps individual nearly all the time.
Why do I say that? Because of the
Delphi method (sometimes previously known as the "Delphi effect"). Basically, when it comes to estimating the duration or "cost" of future software development tasks groups (usually smallish)
almost always perform better than lone individuals (in agile dev. such as Scrum this activity is called Planning Poker). A fair bit of scientific research has gone into this and repeatedly borne it out. In addition to the above link there's heaps of stuff on the web & in academic research articles, plus the following article from today's newspaper which I thought both interesting and highly pertinent. It nowhere uses the term "Delphi" but what it discusses is the same thing.
