The Salesmen/Developers Ratio
Published March 29th, 2011 Under Software Development | 3 Comments
Many of us might think that software is a technological industry. Maybe. But maybe not. If you consider the biggest organizations that sell software tools like Oracle or Microsoft, I suppose that few of us would consider them as technology leaders, but we will all recognize their financial strength and marketing power. This makes me think that long lasting organizations in the software industry have more financial strength than technological capabilities. Read more
Using Experts Tools to Stop Serial Developers
Published December 21st, 2010 Under Software Development | 5 Comments
In the television world, experts track criminals using DNA found on the crime scene. Luckily we don’t have serial killers in the software development world, but we have what I will call “serial developers”. If I had to “profile” them, I would say that they are often young, having recently completed their software development education, or worse with no formal developer training. Read more
Software Crisis? What Software Crisis?
Published September 27th, 2010 Under Software Development | 2 Comments
Some music loving readers could notice that this title is borrowed from a 1975′s Supertramp album. On the cover of this vinyl LP, you can see a guy taking a sunbath in a gray industrial landscape. According to the common interpretation, the term Software Engineering was coined just some years before this, in 1968 at the NATO Software Engineering Conference in Garmisch, Germany. The aim of this conference was already to tame the “software crisis”. Since this era, vinyls and Supertramp have mostly disappeared, but software development seems to have been continuously in crisis and we still debate today if we are software engineers or software craftsmen. Read more
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”.
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