Wednesday, January 23, 2008

The lining up your ducks theory of software development


Software development is easy. Don’t listen to what people say. I was 12 when I started programming and I picked it up no problem. Businesses are full of people who programme without even knowing it: Excel is programming by another name, and how many people write macros?

Yes, programming is really easy. You can buy ‘Programming for Dummies in ...’ - well just about any language you want. People can, and do, create small world changing programs without ever really being taught how to program.

That’s why software development and new businesses go hand in hand. Its one of the reasons why so much innovation today appears as software.

But....

Software development is also one of the hardest things. In fact, developing good software is so complex it might be the most complex thing man has ever attempted.

Moon landing? - it used software, compared to the complexity of the systems in the international space station I’m sure Apollo looks simple.

Nuclear power? - compared to the maths used by the finance industry today it looks simple. And that is all in software.

The thing is, writing a small piece of software can be (but not always) very easy. Problems set in when you want to grow the software, want more people to use it, want to sell it, want to package it, want to re-use the code or ideas, take bugs out of the system, add features, make it run 24x7.

It is very very easy to write simple software and have it do something useful. It is an order of magnitude harder to get it to commercial quality and keep doing it. And, to make it harder, there is no single accepted method for doing this and getting it right every time.

It sometimes amazes me that we get any of this right. More amazing is that software which is fundamentally flawed works, or at least seems to work. Stuff which by any engineering criteria is broken is used by companies every day, they even base their business on it. (There is another blog entry in this.)

Developing good software, delivering on time, producing with sufficient quality, etc. etc. - all the things you expect from ‘professional systems’ is a matter of getting your Ducks in a Row. What I mean is...

Creating good software, meeting expectations, delivering on time and the rest is not just a matter of getting one thing right. It is a matter of getting many things “right” - or at least workable. You can get some of these wrong and still delivery something - maybe a little late, or lacking features but you will do something.

Each time you do something badly, each time one of your ducks is out of position, you won’t break the whole thing. This isn’t a chain, instead of breaking you will reduce your productivity, or move away from the target, or reduce quality. With each duck that moves out of position it gets worse but it still works, somehow.

Put it another way. If creating ‘the best software ever’ means scoring 100%. Each time you move a duck out of position you remove 10%. So:
• don’t co-locate your developers, loose 10%
• start work without talking about design, loose another 10%
• work to a fixed specification or work to no specification loose 10% as well.

Down to 70%.

• Fire developers half way through the project, loose 10% for lost productivity, loose 10% for moral.
• Projects looking late, add more developers, loose 10% for violating Brooks Law.

40% doesn’t look good does it?

But there aren’t many case where you need to score 100%. 90% will do, even 80%, 70% often, some customers will be happy with 40% - or less.

The people who get upset most by this?

Not customers, they get annoyed but quite often there is nothing they can do about it.

It is the developers themselves. They see each loss, they know where all those 10% are being lost. And these guys are problem solvers, they want to fix these problems.

Now go back to my falling off a log theory of business.

I said: you do something right. Not 100%, maybe you just need 10%. But that one thing is about doing something useful, something other people want. Its about benefit and effectiveness.

Viability of your software product/company =
        benefit of your software
                x
        effectiveness of your organization

If your software doesn’t bring many benefits then you need an effective organization to stay in business. You have to be better than the rest.

If your software brings lots of benefits then it doesn’t matter how ineffective your organization - shoot the ducks! - you will stay in business.

If your software has few benefits and you can’t deliver, then Game Over.

Which leaves... lots of benefits and a highly effective organization. Then you have a world beater.

Unfortunately few companies fall into the last category which leave most people working in one of the first three.

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