WHITE PAPERS SPONSORED PROFILES JOB BOARD WEBINAR CENTER FREE SOFTWARE BZ RESEARCH ALMSHAREPOINT EVENTS CALENDAR PRINT/PDF EDITION PRINT/PDF BACK ISSUES

SUBSCRIBE TODAY CUSTOMER SERVICE EDITORIAL CALENDAR EDITORIAL BEATS GUEST VIEW GUIDE SD TIMES 100 GUIDE EVENTS CALENDAR ADVERTISING ARTICLE REPRINTS REPORT A BUG SITE MAP

ABOUT US BZ MEDIA NEWS BZ RESEARCH NEWS ON MONDAY SPTECHREPORT SPTECHWEB SPTECHCON IPHONE/IPAD DEVCON ANDROID DEVCON PRIVACY POLICY CONTACT US

HOME >> LATEST NEWS

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.

Share this link: http://sdt.bz/30481

Most Read Latest News Blog Resources

Zeichick’s Take: Radio moves from analog waveforms to digital packets
Streaming radio highlights the need for streaming applications to be designed to take up as little bandwidth as possible

Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans

Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers

ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development

Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans

Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists

Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles

Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions

Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.

Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.

RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!

GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.

The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...

Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...

Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...

Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...

Technorati

Digg

Slashdot

Facebook

Friendfeed

Twitter

del.icio.us

Letters to the Editor: Give superprogrammers their due Readers disagreed with Larry O’Brien’s assertion that 10X superprogrammers are a myth

Letters to the Editor: What kind of Scrum? A user urges caution when reading surveys about agile use; John McCarthy was remembered for the wrong reason

Letters to the Editor: Oracle misses the Holy Grail Bill Gates is invoked to explain what the ultimate goal of procedural code is; functional programming is overrated

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment

Letters to the Editor: Give superprogrammers their due
Readers disagreed with Larry O’Brien’s assertion that 10X superprogrammers are a myth Read More...

News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>

Download Current Issue
FEBRUARY 2012 PDF ISSUE

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Want to subscribe?

Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
02/09/2012 02:16 PM EST

Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
02/07/2012 11:57 AM EST

RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
02/04/2012 01:57 PM EST

GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
02/03/2012 12:17 PM EST

Facebook claims hacker cred
Facebook's SEC S-1 filing form includes a short essay on the Hacker Way by Mark Zuckerberg himself.
02/02/2012 08:26 AM EST

Ryan Dahl steps down
Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, steps back from his position as gatekeeper for the project.
02/01/2012 04:58 PM EST