Software requirements and strategy

Agile / /
A few weeks ago I wrote about the role of requirements in software development, and then I wrote about business strategy. What might not be obvious is that: in order to have product requirements you need to have a product strategy, and a product strategy needs to come from corporate strategy. If you lack either you might still go through the motions of developing software but it is unlikely that it will meet market or business needs, and it is unlikely you will have a successful product.This happens in all industries but is particularly important in software development because software products are usually the realisation of strategy, so:

1. In order to properly and coherently create a software product you need to have a product strategy. You need to know how the product is going to make you money.

2. In order to have a coherent product strategy you need a coherent corporate strategy. Because the product is the implementation of your corporate strategy.

It doesn’t matter much if your local shop lacks a strategy. People still come and buy things, the shelves are restocked and people get paid. But if you have no strategy for your software why would people buy it? What good does it do them?

You might sell a few copies but without further development the product will rot and sales will dry up. Bugs will become apparent, new operating systems will appear, new applications will emerge that you need to interface to and competitors will match your features. Fail to answer these issues and people will stop buying your software. Things change whether you want to or not. And they change much faster in the software industry than in the corner shop industry.

So you need to move your software forward, keep it fresh, release new versions. And that means you need requirements. But you can only create requirements if you know what your company is trying to do. Otherwise you will end up filling you software with a bunch of features which seem like a good idea to someone but don’t add up to a coherent package.

Now as I said before, it is not enough to have corporate strategy, or even a product strategy. You need to have one that can be communicated and understood by everyone. And you need to actually communicate it and keep on communicating it. Part of the way you communicate it is through product features and updates.

So, you need people who’s job it is to turn that strategy into product features. Those are the people who need to have the ongoing dialogue with customers, the market and developers. These people may be called Product Owners, Business Analysts or Product Managers, what ever, someone has to decide what is in the product and the code developers are not the right people.

Now the difficult bit. Too many companies don’t have a strategy, or they have one they cannot, or will not, communicate. They fail to employ the people who will turn that strategy into reality. So it looks like they are busy but the people doing the coding are directionless.

If you want to play the software business game then don’t leave home unless you have:

1. A strategy you understand
2. People who can make it a reality

To do anything else means you are heading for a software failure.

Unfortunately very few software development books, courses and methods address these issues but I am convinced these problems lie at the heart of many, maybe most, software development failures.

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Thoughts on strategy and software development

Agile / /

My last two blog entries, and some recent reading (I’ll write about it soon) have given me a lot of food for thought about business strategy and how it relates to software development. Fundamentally strategy is about knowing what you are doing, articulating what you are trying to do and using this understanding to drive what you do.

All companies have a strategy whether they realise it or not. I don’t expect many local shop owners spend their time thinking about strategy but they have one. For them strategy is mostly location, location, location. Open a shop in a good location and you will get trade. OK there is a little bit more to it, does the shop sell newspapers? fruit? ethnic foods? In the abstract these are issues of strategy but I expect each one is considered without the need to use the s-word.

This is what I think off as implicit strategy, these businesses have a strategy but it is not spoken about. This approach works – well it mostly works, provided little else changes they can carry on as it. However most of these business are small, one shop, maybe two. But, the more these business grows the greater the need to make the strategy explicit.

An explicit strategy is one that is stated and articulated. This means it can be shared and communicated. If you are going to expand beyond the ideas on the owner’s head then it is necessary to communicate so everyone can pursue the same aims.

Moving from implicit strategy to explicit strategy allows three things (at least) to happen:
• Strategy can be communicated and therefore shared so more people can be involved in the business
• Strategy can be analysed, therefore problems can be spotted and new opportunities can be found
• Strategy can be used to drive execution; so structures, processes and products can all be built to ensure the strategy is successful.

In other words strategy is about scale, it is about creating the conditions to grow.

Now we can return to software development… where exactly the same process happens occurs.

A programmer can have a great idea for a program, and like the shop owner, they can build it. They can stick it on the net and may even sell a few copies. As success grows they may want to hire more developers, thats where the software requires design, architecture and so on. Its about scaling. Once again it is about sharing the ideas and communicating them. It is about analysing the design, finding problems and creating the support infrastructure.

Just to be clear, I’ve said it before in other words: Software Design is equivalent to business strategy. It is about scaling up.

And as this software is success, and more programmers work on it money generation becomes more important. The first program sold because, like the local shop, it was in the right place at the right time, but to sell more copies, to pay for more programmers, you have to know what you are trying to do.

So the software is no longer just software, it is a business, and like all businesses it needs a strategy. And since this business is growing it needs to move from an implicit strategy to an explicit strategy – for all the reasons above and more. The software industry is highly competitive and international, things are always changing. If you don’t consider the changes, and how you will responded you won’t survive long.

Strategy matters more for software companies than to many others. This is because software, indeed all IT, is about change. You use IT (and therefore software) to create change. Either in your organisation or in your customers. You need to understand what kind of change you are creating, how you are creating it and why you are creating it. Organisations are in greatest need of strategy when change is in the air.

There are actually two strategy tracks in a software company, one embedded in the software design, and one stated as business strategy. The two are interlinked and can hinder each other. You cannot pursue a business strategy that your software architecture will not support, and you cannot expect a software design to work well if it runs against business strategy. We’re back to Conway’s Law but that is not my primary point here.

There are two problems I want to highlight. The first concerns strategy itself.

The trouble with strategy is that it is grand, it sounds grand and as the economist John Kay puts it strategy is a synonym for expensive. Consequently all too often strategy formulation becomes the work of ‘big brains’ in the company, or even outside consultants.

This excludes the bulk of the employees and this itself has two problems. First you miss out on their thinking and thus potentially miss out on new ideas and emergent strategies. Second once you have decided your strategy you need to communicate it. This isn’t trivial. Communicating a strategy means you have to be able to communicate it, then you need to actually communicate it, then you need to re-inforce the message and keep re-inforcing it. This takes time.

The second problem with strategy is that it doesn’t happen. Maybe we continue thinking like a small shop keeper: people keep buying our products so we don’t seen the need to rethink anything we do. Or perhaps we do rethink our strategy but perhaps we fail to communicate it. Perhaps only the ‘big brains’ know or understand the strategy.

And these problems are important when you are developing software. Because product requirements derive from the company strategy. If you don’t have a strategy, or you don’t have an strategy people know about and understand then you stand little chance of understanding what your software products should do.

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Requirements: A dialogue not a document

Agile / / / 1 Comment

I’m not a lover of requirements documentation. I’ve discussed this at length before – see Why Do Requirements Change? and The Documentation Myth. However requirements and even requirements documents do have a part to play in the development process. This fact has been brought home to me recently while working with ‘Requirements by Bullet Point’ and ‘Requirements by Project Name.’

These two conditions arise when people try to take short cuts with documentation. In the first case, Requirements by Bullet Point (RBBP), somebody lists ‘the obvious’ requirements, or the ‘things we all know’. In the second, Requirements by Project Name (RBPN), people come to believe the project name conveys all the requirements necessary, unfortunately, the same name tends to mean different things to different people.

What such requirements miss is that the devil is in the detail. Every line of code in a software product contains multiple decisions. A product with 10,000 lines of code contains millions of individual decisions. Some, many, of these decisions relate back to the requirements. When this information is not available the guys writing the code have to guess. When developers have to guess it is the business which suffers.

Agile development lends a whole new twist to the problem because it specifically sets out to deal with changing requirements. But some people believe this means you can start out with no requirements. In traditionally waterfall projects requirements came at the start so projects should not proceed without them. Thats the theory but in practice such projects also fall pray to RBBP or RBPN.

The problem isn’t helped by developers who believe requirements are not necessary, after all, developers know best. Occasionally this is true, normally it occurs with very technical products or where a developer is themselves an expert in the field. The danger is always that developers mistake what they want to do, or what they can do, with what needs doing. What needs doing (the requirements) always needs to be rooted in what the business or market wants and needs.

To make things worse requirements often play multiple roles in a project. Not only are they technical requirements but they are also part of a legal contract and a financial rewards (and penalties) system. When they are called on to fill these multiple roles things just get more complicated.

The problem is that requirements (and I extend this to include specifications here) are just plain difficult for all the reasons I outlined in Why Do Requirements Change? and The Documentation Myth and more.

I think the solution is to recognise that project requirements are an ongoing, evolving, entity. They are not written once and set in stone, they are a continuing process not an event. Or to put it another way, they are a Dialogue not a Document. And to have a dialogue you need multiple people. One of these people needs to be the owner of the requirements, these may be called the Product Manager, the Product Owner, a Manager or a Business Analyst.

The important point is there needs to be someone who is charged with having these dialogues and ensuring a consistent view emerges. Consistent doesn’t mean unchanging but it does mean it remains fairly stable and only changes when new facts or events emerge.

This person needs to be hold an ongoing dialogue with all the stake-holders: the customers, the end-users, the developers, the market, the wider organisation and even the software itself, by looking at it, evaluating it and looking at its competitors. Somebody needs to be charged with knowing what the product needs to be and articulating that view.

Requirements documents have a part to play too. The process of creating the document is an learning exercise for the product owner. In writing the document they are forced to research the subject and pull all their thoughts together in a logical order. For other people the document shows that somebody has done their due diligence and thought about the issues.

Unfortunately too many people in too many companies believe a static document, or RBBP, or RBPN or thought-transference is sufficient to get a software product created. Waterfall had it partly right in this respect, you need requirements to a project, you need to know what you are trying to do, but you need to constantly keep asking and re-asking that question and stating the answer.

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Agile: Software and Strategy

Agile / /

One of the reoccurring themes of this blog is my belief that there are strong parallels between the creation of company strategy and the development of software. For a start both are intellectual exercises that produce abstract models. You cannot tell how successful either is until it is tested in use and both require large amount of intellectual thinking.

I also believe that many of the techniques used in software design and strategy formation can be successfully applied to both domains. Both domains can learn from the other.

And, to top it all, because so much business strategy is implemented through software I see software execution as a continuation of the strategy process.

Consequently I’m always on the look out for evidence to support this theory. This month I thought I had found some more evidence. An article in this months issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review entitled Closing the Gap Between Strategy and Execution by Donald Sull seems to support my case. In fact it seems the article has discovered many of the practices of Agile software development in the strategy formation and execution process, e.g.

  • Use of iterations: plan some, do some, assess and re-plan;
  • Use of commitment, or promises, over estimation
  • A reflection process that sounds a lot like the Retrospectives we practice in software development.

So was this the missing link?

Unfortunately not, in this case it is hard to disentangle cause and effect. First of all you have to go back to the roots of the Agile software movement…

Agile development has its root in the Lean manufacturing movement, and in the “Quality if Free” ethos, and in business strategy itself.

The term Agile itself comes from the business domain, tracing backwards – and I haven’t tried very hard – the first reference I know about comes from Alistair Cockburn (Agile Software Development, 2002) who cites Goldman (Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations, 1995).

Sometime in the 1990’s the idea of ‘Business Agility’ arose. This raises its head from time to time in business literature but only in software development does – as far as I know – it seem to have taken off. (I have a theory or two here and I’ll explore them in a future blog if I get the time.)

So this article builds on research into software development processes which are themselves in partly the result of reading the business literature. You see why I say cause and effect are hard to untangle?

In writing this blog I’ve looked up the Donald Sull’s web site and discovered a lots of mentions of “Strategic agility” and it seems he teaches a course on this at LBS. Which goes to prove that business Agility is alive and well and prospering in at least one business school.

Unfortunately the business agility community and the agile software community do not seem to have much cross over. This is where Sull’s article in the Sloan Review is interesting because he does mention software development. However he doesn’t mention Agile software development, neither does he fully reference the agile software development literature.

Sull cites Scrum as an example of how strategy formation might work, and how the “new rules” of strategy formation might be used. However, given that Scrum is Agile, and Agile has its roots in business is this reference circular?

To be honest, I think Sull has missed some points. As I just said I think he could have referenced the software development literature he cites, for an academic that strikes me as a little sloppy.

Secondly he proposes a strategy formation cycle of four steps: Make sense, Make choices, Make things happen and Make revisions. To me that looks a lot like Deming’s Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) cycle.

I’m probably being picky here. The MIT Sloan Review is towards the popularist end of academic journals. It tries to contain articles that managers might actually read. Had Sull given us the full academic treatment (and he may well have done so elsewhere) the thing would be read a lot less.

So, where does all this leave us?

Well I take it as good news. Someone else is finding links between software development and business strategy, specifically in the Agile field of both subjects. This can only be good news if it brings the two domains a little closer. And personally I think this further validates my theory.

This may also show that the software development community are at the cutting edge of understanding how you actually go about doing agile anything. It is one thing to talk about an Agile strategy but how do you execute one? What do you actually do?

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IT is from Mars, HR is from Venus

Agile / /

In general IT and Human Resource departments do not get on well together.  To be fair to IT I’m not sure any department in a company gets on brilliantly with HR but IT seems to get one worse than most.  I once worked for a company where one senior manager claimed “I only work for small companies, as soon as they get big enough to have an HR director I leave.”  True to his word within a year of the firm appointing a permanent HR director he was gone.

When you look at it the two departments really are opposites.

  • HR is generally staffed by people who use people skills, they do touchy-feely, they do form filling and the do structure.  HR comes along late in a company’s life; nobody founds a firm by starting with an HR group.  HR is also, if we believe stereotypes, largely staffed by women.

  • IT – and really I’m talking specifically about software development groups – are the reverse.  They are staffed by people who don’t know the meaning of the word touch, generally dislike form filling (why fill in a form when you can create an electronic systems?) and are creative.  Software developers are often the first people in a start-up company.  And on the whole the teams are male dominated.

To be fair to HR – and I have been known to stand up for them in the past – they do have good intentions.  HR departments can be a force for good in a company and they do work that does need doing in big companies.  On the whole IT people do not appreciate this.  Which just goes to make the conflict so much worse.

I’ve commented on this subject before.  Then I gave two reasons: firstly that HR groups just do not understand IT and secondly that you actually need damn good HR people if they are to benefit IT. 

So why are software developers so different form the other groups HR works with?

Well I think there are some characteristics of development teams which alienates them from HR people.  Other groups and individuals have these characteristics but in software development they are more common and more pronounced:

  • Technical skills are to the fore and social skills can be non-existent.  I think the developers of tomorrow need for more social skills than those of yesterday but still technical skills are key.  This is the opposite of HR departments themselves where social skills are more important than technical skills.

  • Software developers often appear to job-hop.  A year here, two years there, six months there.  To a classical HR person this looks risky, will this person be with the company in three years?  But actually this can give a software developer a lot more experience than they would get from working on the same code base year after year.

    And it is not really developers’ fault.  Much development work is project based, teams expand and contract, therefore people move teams and people move between companies to follow the projects.  Further more because so many software companies are start-ups the risk of company failure and redundancy is that much higher, it is an occupational risk.  Unlike HR departments which only exist in safe companies.

    The really odd bit is that the best developers may have the most fractured CVs.  If you are good you will be hunted.  If you are an average developer you are more likely to stay in one place because fewer people want you.  Simply good people move.  This is the opposite of what HR expect.  Part of this is because…

  • Productivity varies:  good developers can be twice or ten times as productive as average developers.  In fact one study I saw put it as high as 27 times more productive.  Yet do you see this in their pay?  Many of us have met hyper-productive developers but have you ever met one who was paid twice or ten times more than the average one sitting next to him?

    These kind of difference mean that developers who are a little bit better than average can be significantly more productive.  Thus becomes more important to be able to differentiate between someone who is 10% better than average and someone who is 15%.

    As a result a good developer can consistently extract more economic-rent from an employer.  Because paying people these sorts of differentials is alien to HR groups they don’t do it thereby leaving the gate open for someone else to.

  • Software developers often lack traditional career markers: in other words they generally don’t do sport.  They were never school team captain and – if they are like me – spent their teenage years in front of a computer honing their skills.  And they don’t move up the career paths into management.  If you have a great developer then keep him developing, do not force him into management if he wants to carry on cutting code.

This is all leading up to one more difference.  The best software developers are clever, very very clever.  There is a scene in the BBC film “Breaking the Code” where someone from the Ministry of War tells Alan Turning “You are much more intelligent than most of the people around us.  That makes them very nervous.”  I think that effect is at work too.

So what can be done?

There needs to be work on both sides.  HR needs to appreciate the special challenges and demands of managing IT resources and especially software developers.  IT needs to recognise how HR can help and the corporate need for HR.  But this may not be enough, we may need a structural solution.

A few months ago I visited the offices of one of the UK’s leading national newspapers.  There are two sides to a newspaper: the business side, including production, advertising, marketing, accounts, etc. and then there is the editorial side.  Because of the need to keep editorial independent this needs to be handled by journalists.  Therefore, there needs to be two HR departments.  The first is for the bulk of the employees and the second is just for the journalists.

I suppose the main HR group could handle the routine admin like payroll, tracking holidays etc.  but to have journalists governed by the same management structure could compromise editorial independence.  So they have their own HR group, staffed with managers from the editorial side.

This model could work in IT.  I can imagine a new role inside the group “Technical HR manager”.  This person would be involved with hiring, performance reviews, etc. etc. but they would know about technical people in depth.  They would come from a technical background themselves.

Although this might sound like a drastic change I think it is reasonable.  Companies which depend on software development really bet their future on their people.  They bet that their people can develop better technology than the competition.  What appears to be a technology based business is in fact a people based business.  There is vast difference between having above average people and above above average people.  Just go and ask Google or Microsoft.

Ironic isn’t it?  HR departments can’t be trusted when human resources are the most important thing.

And that’s another thing, why on earth did we dump the name Personnel Department? We are not talking about some plug-compatible resources here, we are talking about people.  Living breathing people, not resources.

My guess is that Personnel Departments dumped the title so they could put themselves on a part with the money and machines, the other resources; in doing so they lost sight of their key differentiator.  When people are key you have to treat them as such.

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Indian outsourcing gets more expensive

Agile / /

I’ve been saying for a while that there is no need to panic over the outsourcing/off-shoring of software development work to India.  As far as I am concerned the pie is big enough, it is expanding, and India is not the right place to do much of this work.  The right place is right next to the business.

Add to that economics.  India may produce a lot of computer science and engineering graduates but less than 10% of them are useful to the industry.  Of those that are there are not enough to satisfy demand, staff turn over is high and wages are rising.

Just before I left for EuroPLoP I saw this story in the FT “Bangalore wages spur reverse offshoring”.  The story even made it to the editorial column too  “Outsourced to the US”.  Basically wages are rising and the price advantage is disappearing.

As I predicted (December 2006, July 2006 and June 2007) India is pricing itself out of some types of work and it is more economic to do the work in the high-wage US or Europe.

Even if India staff are cheaper you have to factor in:

  • Communication and travel costs.

  • Additional processes, procedures, documentation, etc. which you don’t need when the guys are down the hall.

  • Delays in responding.

  • Cost correcting cultural differences, and extra costs in being specific.

It makes sense to offshore some work to India (or China, or Russia) but not all work.  You have to judge these things on a case by case basis. 

Unfortunately one side of this I haven’t accounted for before is management that believe the hype.  If you are attracted by offshoring to India you must go and do your own analysis: count all the costs, assess the risk, look at the time it will take, etc. etc. 

The unfortunate bit is I think some managers are not doing this.  They are jumping on the bandwagon when it doesn’t make sense.

More unfortunate, as far as I can tell there are far too many start-up India outsourcing companies willing to cater for unprepared managers who want to outsource.  I suspect the big, well established, companies want projects that succeed.  They will avoid work from unprepared managers looking to ride the bandwagon.

However, the smaller companies just want work.  They can’t afford the luxury of turning work away so they will accept it from even the most ill prepared companies.  So you get the unprepared working with the worst possible partners.

And that is why, some companies have great offshoring experiences and most have failures.

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Unit testing (from objectives)

Agile / / / 1 Comment

Still responding to the questions posted in response to my TDD and objectives entry. The question was about how to do TDD, specifically UI and also about what happens when the general consistency fails.

Well the UI question is easy: You can’t really do TDD for user interfaces.  You can, but you have to jump through hoops to get your test framework to push buttons.  Of course there are tools which will do this for you but these usually fall into the realm of ATDD (Acceptance TDD) and system testing.

But, what TDD can help you with is the logic behind the UI.  We all know we should separate program and business logic from the UI but we also all know it has a habit of getting in there.  Well if you are practising TDD you separate the two (as you know you should) and you can TDD the logic and leave the UI as a lot more trivial. (And testable with other tools.)

The other way of doing it is to test the output.  Increasingly application emit XML or HTML to generate their user interfaces and you can test that.  You can test small segments of XML to see if it contains the expected data.

For me the secret of TDD is that it is a Design technique, thats what the second D stands for after all.  It is about designing your code with tests rather than UML, or flow charts or what ever.  You do it before you write the code, it forces you to think about what you are about to write and that is design.

Second part of the question: general consistency.  Well, true, a little change might break a lot of tests, but actually you want that to happen.  If someone removed operator== then you want your tests to break because it highlights the change. 

A good set of tests round your code ensures that any unexpected changes are found quickly.

Of course, when you make a significant change in your code you might find a lot of tests broken, and you end up having to fix lots of tests but:

  • Firstly a major change should product major breakage so you can get it right

  • Second a well structured, properly separated design, will be less prone to breaking.  Writing tests is itself an engineering exercise.

All in all TDD promotes a lot of good practises which we know are good but somehow forget to do.

 

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Objectives again

Agile / /

I don’t normally respond to comments on my blog.  Most of them don’t actually require anything more to be said but on this occasion I thought I should respond.  And keeping to my one entry one comment policy I’ll take them both separately.

So, the question was: Am I changing my view on objectives?

And my answer is: It depends; in this case I’ll wait and see what happens.

I think it is worth knowing what you are aiming for.  I think setting your own objectives is worth while and can help improve your performance.  And I think they are a good way of communicating priorities to and from management.

I also think that if you are going to have explicit objectives it helps if they can be more objective than subjective.  So, the SMART rules make sense.  But… well, there are problems….

Not everything you want to aim for can be specific or measured.  Quite often we operate with ambiguity.  A lot of my work is ill defined, trying to make it better defined can be useful but it can also be counter productive because things will change.  I’m not really sure what my goal is or should be, I just kind of know the general direction.

There is also a problem with the achievable and realistic part of the rule; in a word setting realistic goals encouraged people to satisfice.  If your promotion, pay rise or bonus depends on meeting an objective then there will always be a tendency to aim slightly lower, for something that is more achievable.

As much as they can improve communication between management and workers they can also be the source of misunderstanding; when they are imposed on people, when management sets the objective and forgets about them for a year, or when management sets them and then abdicates all responsibility for helping someone meet them.

So I stick by my answer: it depends.  I’m in favour of objectives when they are used appropriately.

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TDD, Objective setting and doing the obvious

Agile / / / 2 Comments

I’ve been doing a round of objective setting for my client recently. When it was first announced the company wanted to go down this path I groaned. “Arhh” I thought, “I hate objectives, I hate people setting them, I hate all the baggage that comes along with them.” Neither was I impressed by the way my client’s HR department presented the idea or the proposal for implementation.

I’m a past master at criticising management by objective, it is quite easy really, just look at the side effects and read Goodhart’s Law. Anyway, its not turning out like that at all, little bit of imaginative thinking and things are looking good. Sure we are only in the objective setting phase so far so it is too early to say, much could happen but….

First I have rigorously applied the SMART approach – objectives need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time boxed. Second I added an extra criteria “V” – call it the SMART+V formula. “V” stands for Value-add. (Only I now realise it should be V+SMART, if you can’t show value don’t continue.)

Next was the realisation that the development team all did pretty much the same job. Therefore one could expect them to have pretty similar objectives. And if they all had similar objectives it would aid team work.

Finally, I think I realised how to use this to my advantage. The team have not been doing code reviews or Test Driven Development (automated unit testing if you prefer) but everyone is willing to do both. So, its now turning out that most of the team have objectives around these area. Not everyone, and individual goals might have a slightly different take but they all build.

Half way through and this approach seems obvious. If a manager wants his team to do TDD then why not just set it as an objective? Surely this is the way it is meant to work: manager decides, manager aligns team, team does what manager wants.

If it is this obvious why bother with all the TDD evangelising, training, coaching and calls to do it. Why both with fancy change ideas. Just set it as a target and do it. Could it be so easy?

Of course it isn’t going to be that easy. For a start just because it is set as an objective doesn’t mean it is going to be met. Just because people want to do something doesn’t give them the knowledge to do it; at the start people don’t know how to do it. Then there are the usual problems like time pressures and people who will think “it won’t work here.”

Having set it as an objective I’m still going to have to work hard at giving people as much support, training, coaching and other assistance as I can.

One real danger to this approach is that the managers who set these kind of objectives might just believe that setting an objective is all that is required. As I just said: setting it as an objective doesn’t mean it will happen. Objectives are a two way street and managers need to help people meet theirs. Thats why I’m thinking of setting my own objective as: “Team reaches 80% of objectives.”

If this approach is so obvious why haven’t I done it before? Well apart from the problems I just outlined this particular tool has not been available to me in the past. Sometimes management wasn’t bought in to TDD, sometimes objectives weren’t in use and sometimes I wasn’t in a position to set the objectives.

At the moment it feels good and I think its going to work. I’ll report back…

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Introducing: Software Inside

Agile / /

I’m going through some notes from the ACCU conference in April and note I made after a conversation with someone – I forget who so sorry for not crediting you properly but I want to capture these thought….

We write software but we seldom write software for the sake of it. We write software as part of something else. Perhaps we write embedded software for a mobile phone, or we write an enterprise application for an account department – you get the idea.

The thing the software goes into – devices, process, etc. – is itself a system. A mobile phone is an electronics system, which is part of the cellular communications system; an accounts ledger is part of a business systems which tracks accounts.

Increasingly it is software that makes all of these systems possible. You could do a lot of this in hardware, albeit specialist hardware but doing it in software is easier and cheaper. Despite all the problems with writing a software application to manage a cell phone it is still a lot simpler, cheaper and faster than creating dedicated hardware.

Software allows you to use commodity hardware, commodity manufacturing and commodity infrastructure to create your product. The truly unique bit rests in the software. While you can copy the binary code or application for virtually nothing the creation of that software is unique. Knowledge is embedded within the software.

Ultimately all software systems are simply part of a bigger system. Systems have software inside.

This idea isn’t new. I’ve said it myself before, what is new is the term: Software Inside. I guess we can credit Intel with providing the inspiration for the term – thanks Intel!

This term allows us to focus not so much on the software but on the greater system: the phone, the accounts system, the car, the washing machine, the moon-landing, etc. The fact that we know about software can take us (the software developers) into many different and strange domains.

And once in them we ourselves, the software experts, need to adapt and learn these new domains. We need to be soft ourselves. Software developers need to be cameleons.

Introducing: Software Inside Read More »