Power law of practice in software implementation: Does this explain the “W” going away?

I wonder if this result explains why the second semester students in Briana’s studies (see previous blog post) didn’t have the “W” effect.  If you do enough code, you move down the power law of practice, and now you can attend to things like context and generating subgoal labels.

Different subjects start the experiment with different amounts of ability and past experience. Before starting, subjects took a multiple choice test of their knowledge. If we take the results of this test as a proxy for the ability/knowledge at the start of the experiment, then the power law equation becomes (a similar modification can be made to the exponential equation):

That is, the test score is treated as equivalent to performing some number of rounds of implementation). A power law is a better fit than exponential to this data (code+data); the fit captures the general shape, but misses lots of what look like important details.

Source: The Shape of Code » Power law of practice in software implementation