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HOME >> OPINIONS

Kill Your Inventory Manager

By Ryan Martens

December 1, 2006 — (Page 1 of 3)
We’ve all seen the “Kill Your Television” bumper stickers that encourage us to fix all of our family dysfunction by moving away from that giant time-suck called prime time. If I could create a similar bumper sticker to address the professional lives of software teams, it would be: “Kill Your Inventory Manager.” The implication is that you can fix your team’s dysfunction by moving away from the giant time-suck and paralyzing friction of inventory management in software development.

As a profession, we have gotten extremely good at managing inventory. It has taken us years—but, boy, we build some giant tools and systems to manage it. We have come to believe that planning is a weekly act of re-prioritizing the inventory list and progress is measured by the number of items that are completed. With modern bug-trackers and requirements management systems, we can even transfer the burden of inventory tracking to our customers by exposing the bug/issue list front-and-center on our Web site or open-source project page. In the worst cases, life deteriorates to a level where the team essentially works for the inventory manager and where customers believe they are there to test. Is this the best way to build highly usable, valuable software?

If you are thinking to yourself right now that software is similar to a manufacturing setting in which inventory is a necessary evil—wake up. For the past 20 years, the best manufacturers (think Toyota and Dell) have worked to reduce all forms of inventory, realizing it makes them fat, slow and uncompetitive.

Inventory management systems were originally built to support a waterfall, or assembly-line, approach to software development. Metaphorically, these systems are akin to horizontal shelves that accumulate inventory in the factory and warehouse. What is the problem with in-progress work stacked neatly on shelves and ready to be completed? Hidden in those piles of work and systems are very bad defects tied to technical debt, important requirements and lots of partially completed items that are development complete, but not “done” enough to release or test. Managing, prioritizing and re-prioritizing these piles are a waste of the team’s time that increasingly slows the delivery of real, working product.

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Novell adds WS-Federation to Access Manager
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