Are Software Developers Worth More than Accountants?
Published June 23rd, 2010 Under Software Development | 5 Comments
Methods & Tools is located in Switzerland, a country famous for its chocolate, watches… and banks. I was therefore participating to a banking IT conference last month. The CIO of a very large private banks revealed that 15% of employees of his company were working for the IT department. He described them as the “mechanics” supporting all the business. And I thought this was nice. Then a CEO of a retail bank came to present the results of a survey of Swiss bank top managers. They were asked what would make their bank different or better than their competitors. None of the answers mentioned IT. And I thought this was not nice. It was a surprise for him too, as he said that now 90% of his bank consumer loans were originated from its Web site. Read more
Does Size Matter (in Software Development)?
Published March 22nd, 2010 Under Software Development | Leave a Comment
When friends ask me what is the last trend in software development, I answer Lean. This approach is even easier to describe, because you can take examples outside the software industry and the most famous of them is Toyota. The recent problems faced by the Japanese car manufacturer shows that every idea could get difficulties fostering its original values when scaling and software development is no exception to this rule. I know that the Toyota situation is complex and I still believe that they did a nice job creating a special corporate culture, but for the public their image problem is there.
Agile has become “the thing to do” in software development and is now being used as the (marketing) label of every new initiative or tool. As a result, the fate of the original values of Agile Manifesto are to be diluted at best, abused at worst. I believe that the Agile Manifesto signatories were motivated by a sincere goal to give to the people involved in software development projects a better situation at a time when there could be a tendency to consider them as mere procedure performers. However, as the agile ideas spread and became successful, they meet the fact that software development is also a business for software tools vendors, consulting organizations… and media like Methods & Tools. Going from selling toaster to selling agile toaster could be now a mandatory move to be listed in the LeadingAnalystFirm Bermuda Triangle report and the front page of the press. It will however not bring any real benefits to agile or to toasters. A recent trade magazine report and tool vendor press release spoke about “taming the agile beast”. This looks like a strange appreciation of Agile. Are thinking software developers dangerous animals? Does this mean that it is times to dump Mike Cohn and instead hire Siegfried and Roy to lead your projects? As Agile spreads, so are the chances that its initial ideas will be misunderstood… and that the number of failed projects claiming to follow the Agile approach will (strongly?) increase. I add the “claim” part, because some Agilists will reply that “true” Agile project cannot fail, but this would be the topic for another discussion.
Sir Winston Churchill said “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” The fact that it could be difficult to keep the ideal of approaches that rely strongly on participants’ behavior when you scale them should not prevent us to aim for the best objectives. We have however to be realistic on the real world constraints, adapt to them and recognize that we cannot always reach perfection ;o) On this topic, I recommend the excellent books of Craig Larman and Bas Vodde on scaling lean and agile development. In the introduction of their first volume, they wrote: “Start with a small group of great people and only grow when it really starts to hurt”. I could not give you a better advice. In our software development world, the “too big to fail” motto could easily be replaced by “too big to succeed”.
The Times They Are a-Changin’ ? Maybe Not
Published March 8th, 2010 Under Software Development | 2 Comments
I will rather say that history repeats itself. By the way, this is a quote from Hegel and Marx added that first time was tragedy, and the second time farce. Yet this post is not about a Bob Dylan against Marx debate, but about a thought that came when, after following a conference presenting some of the IBM Rational products, I discovered the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration initiative. OSLC defined itself as “a community effort to help software delivery teams by making it easier to use lifecycle tools in combination. The OSLC community is creating open, public descriptions of resources and interfaces for sharing the things that software delivery teams rely on, like change requests, test cases, defects, requirements and user stories.” I first thought that Rational Jazz, self-defined as “an open platform designed to support any industry participant who wants to improve the software lifecycle and break down walls between tools” would be the place for tool integration. Apparently building this platform was not enough to foster tool collaboration.
I was traveling back 20 year back in time when IBM already tried to combine multiple tools data in a single repository, an initiative called AD Cycle. The grails (without groovy) of having different vendors tools communicating has been since then attempted again by some other “standards” like CDIF (Common Data Interchange Format) or PCTE (Portacle Common Tool Environment). I am sure that you have all heard about these initiatives and that they are one of the key factors when you make a tool acquisition decision. Aren’t they?
One of the problems of these initiatives for uniting tools is that vendors mostly favor bilateral alliances and create integration with selected partners. However, the most important issue is that except for IBM, most of the industry players have a (very) short life expectancy. Most of them will disappear before the time needed to define and implement such standards. Anybody remember of Knowledgeware’s ADW, Index Technologies’ Excelerator or Arthur Andersen Method/1? If yes, it means that you have some gray hairs … and a good memory (let’s see the positive points). The current list of tool partners of OSLC is far from being impressive and the probabilities that this initiative will have the same fate than its predecessors are high.
Review of 2009 for Software Development: Many Acquisitions and a Funeral
Published January 21st, 2010 Under News, Software Development | 2 Comments
Last year has certainly been busy for the software development tools industry. We have seen many companies merging together and also the funeral of one of the oldest brand in the software development industry. Read more
The Consultant, the Coach and Delivering Value
Published January 4th, 2010 Under Software Development | 3 Comments
The Winter 2009 issue of Methods & Tools contains an interesting article from Rachel Davies about Agile Coaching Tips. She shares her experience that is also available in the excellent book that she wrote with Liz Sedley. When I reviewed her book this summer, I started thinking about the coaching role that external people are now assuming versus the traditional consultant position. On the same question I saw a recent blog post discussing the utility of agile coaches. The author said that you should accept advice only from people that had achieved themselves something big, citing personalities like John Carmack or Linus Torvalds. Read more
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