I spend a lot of time workingwith customers and talking with colleagues about how to build better software,faster, and cheaper. Yes, "better, faster, cheaper" is hard,maybe impossible, but boy is it an enticing goal in custom application development. Ourdiscussions often look at various technologies that promise improvements -Silver Bullets. Every few months someone launches a new technology withpromises of huge efficiency gains, and a lot of these do offer productivitygains, after an appropriate learning curve - of course, first the productivityactually drops, as the team learns the new technology, spends time oninfrastructure setup, etc. The better, smaller options have very easylearning curves and quickly add to overall productivity, but there is always some initial drop before the the benefits begin to accrue.
We are technologists, and weare always looking for interesting new frameworks, tools, and ideas to improvethe technology we use to deliver our projects. Whether it is a newautomated static analysis tool, like CAST Software to help with application architecture analysis or abetter IDE for Java application development (likeIntelliJ) or new testing tools and frameworks to make our software testing outsourcing serviceseven better we often get excited about a "shiny new toy" that we canuse to be more productive and deliver better software every day.
Of course, these SilverBullets usually turn out the same way - a good tool, with some definitebenefit, but definitely not a game changing advance that will provide aorder-of-magnitude improvement in the quality of software developed. Themost effective way to improve the the overall software delivered - making itbetter, faster, and cheaper - is to improve the SoftwareDevelopment Process. When we sit down to work with clients, weoften talk about a list such as the following as a starting point for ensuringsuccess -- measured in terms of Business Value in the delivered software -- forour projects.
1. Focuson the top 20% of features
2. Breakthings up into smaller projects
3. Noneed for minuscule details
4. Letthe system evolve
5. Obtainuser feedback
6. Empoweryour users
7. Mistakesare a way of learning
8. Lesspeople in meetings
9. Smallerteams
10. Somethinghas to give in the Iron Pyramid (Quality, Time, Cost, Features)
It's no surprise that this list closely embodies many of the principles that the Agile development movement espouses. Agile development concepts are rooted in basic idea of trying to produce more value for an organization. In software development terms this means better software for the same cost (or faster, or cheaper, or all 3!). By having the business customer prioritize the features in the backlog, showing incremental progress each week or two, and being focused on measuring Running, Tested, Features the investment in software development is always focused on providing the best value for the business customers for the given investment.
In future posts I'll expand each of these topics further.
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