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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR


By SD Times News Team
April 15, 2007 — 
No more left turns? According to United Parcel Service (UPS), turning left wastes time, fuel and introduces risk. So “Brown” has more or less banned the practice of turning left as a business process optimization measure. Why do organizations go to these lengths to wring pennies and seconds from their processes? Because seconds count and because those organizations have matured their processes to the point that they’re highly optimized and only highly incremental improvements can be made.?

If UPS is an example of truly optimized business process, software development is its perfect counterpoint. We’re all familiar with the storied history of software project failure. While the rest of business is subject to close scrutiny and deep analysis, software development processes are left to chance. Why? Because software development has always been considered a black art—a highly creative, spontaneous and unstructured craft that can’t be rushed—or even closely managed.

Of course, software development is a creative process, and it will never have the uniform repeatability of something like shipping packages. But just the same, software development is a business process—and a costly and highly valued one at that. Allowing the preponderance of software development projects to whither on the vine because of an outmoded perception that software development is a gestalt that can’t be fully understood and held to business standards is a convenient argument without merit.

A key part of optimizing software development processes is helping organizations to understand the use of time. How much time is spent actively coding, debugging, building, testing software? What is the relative allocation of time across projects? This empowers organizations to align resources to the highest yield outcome.

Typically this sort of data would come at an excessive cost: developers distracted from their core responsibilities and subject to manually entering their time. Of course this is directly at odds with the mandate of process optimization. This is a key opportunity for automation. Software engineers, like many knowledge workers, spend the majority of their time in computer-based tools and applications. With the richness of today’s technologies, it is now possible to tap into these tools to automatically extract data about the execution of the software development process—without distracting the developer or requiring them to work differently.

This sort of automation will create unprecedented visibility into software development processes, empowering organizations and helping to eliminate the proverbial left turns that contribute to software project failures. The good news is that this isn’t science fiction. Some software development organizations are doing this today, particularly in the context of offshore development where visibility and managerial control are major challenges.

Greg Burnell

CEO

6th Sense Analytics

Letters to SD Times should include the writer’s name, company affiliation and contact information. Letters become the property of BZ Media and may be edited. Send to feedback@bzmedia.com.


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