Blog posts on software development

Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

• Toyota IT for Kaizen

  IT often does the opposite of lean management and makes things more complex, more prone to error, less effective, etc.. Often all in search of only one thing – cutting costs. For that people should not be faulted for being skeptical of IT solutions. However, that does not mean that IT cannot play a part in improvements. It can, just be careful.

  I find it a good sign when the CIO office is helping people find solutions at the request of the users rather than dictating solutions from on high. Some of the dictating might be necessary to optimize the system of IT (some local sub optimization may be required for the overall good) but in my opinion this is used as an excuse far too often.

  Related: The Edge-case Excuse (a post I wrote more recently on the topic of error prone IT solutions)

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• 10x Productivity Difference in Software Development

  I think these orders of magnitude are not present between people in many jobs. And I think people’s ability to correctly access who are orders of magnitude better is often faulty. But my experience leads me to believe the difference between exceptional software developers and average (not even below average) is very high.

  In many fields interruptions are costly (and multi-taking is wasteful. In software development those interruptions are often much more costly than in other fields.

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• IT Outsourcing to India Slowing (2006)

  Outsourcing IT makes a lot of sense but it is complex to do well. The first rush of outsourcing was just an attempt to save money by moving work to sites where the workers could be paid less. This is classic economics and the economic theory has worked well. Capitalists moved work to where the competitive advantage was. The economic reaction was what you would expect – Indian IT wages raised drastically and other costs of doing business have continued to rise (much higher turnover as the opportunities that workers had expanded they jump from one job to another).

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• Toyota IT Overview

  IT solutions should support your processes not dictate them. I am a big fan of avoiding inflexible, proprietary (off the shelf) software. I am willing to spend money on in house developers to create customized IT solutions that support the business processes instead of IT solutions that dictate business processes.

  continue reading: Toyota IT Overview
• Change Your Name to Work With Our Software

  My advice. Don’t create stupid restrictions (in IT systems or otherwise). What do you care how long people’s names are? There are many people with 2 character names (even if your software says they are invalid, and + are a valid email character even if your software doesn't think so).

  Also, have customer service personnel who are trying to improve the system, not trying to get the customer off the phone to meet some arbitrary numerical target. Most often the representatives seem most concerned with getting you off the phone. An effective system to discover what needs to be improved is not something that management has bothered to design into the system. Big mistake.

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• Software Developers Should Work Together With Those Who Will Use the Software

  When developing software applications in house, developers should work in cooperation with those who will use it. Working from requirements is not a very effective way to proceed. It is similar to the old idea of suppliers working to specifications. Dr. Deming taught long ago that companies needed to work with suppliers and customers to improve the overall system. Well managed companies have learned this and practice it.

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• The New Age of Robots and What it Means for Jobs

  Industrial robots are the most advanced application of robots in business today but they are still far from plug and play solutions. They require skilled experts to have them work effectively; but the capabilities and usability have greatly increased over the last 20 years. Respect for people (and all that entails about the management system) is an important part of creating a management system to have the most success integrating robots.

  The ability of us to create technological solutions to accomplish tasks that required people has exploded in the last 20 years and will continue to. Lawyers are finding much of what they do can be done by a computer. Much, doesn’t mean all, obviously. Search and rescue in disaster areas is another task that robots are playing an increasing role in; and the use of robots will likely continue to grow quickly. Technology is taking over many aspects of medical care that were not long ago seen as requiring highly trained and experience medical professionals (reading scans, diagnosing illness…).

  
  I think many of these advances are moving so quickly that we are not properly thinking about the long term future of our organizations. The disruption these changes will take will be difficult to predict and plan for.

  ...

  continue reading: The New Age of Robots and What it Means for Jobs
• Applying W. Edwards Deming’s Ideas in Software Development

  In her presentation at the Deming Research conference, Poorani Jeyaseker explains how the management system drives behavior that is not useful to the organization. The business team asks for estimates for software development. Those estimates are treated as promises. The management system creates a punishment mechanism for missing estimates by over 10%. Of course this creates fear and pressure to make sure work can be completed within the 110% * estimate. So logically the estimates are padded (both to account for the natural variation in how close estimates are to final results and for the existing culture that means changes will be made to requirements without the estimate being adjusted)...

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• Hey Siri, You Can Do Better

  Software testing is more than just automated testing. While checking that specific details work as expected in specific situations with automated testing is very useful it is far from sufficient way to test if software will delight users.

  ...

  software testing also requires thoughtful analysis of the experience of the user and how that is at risk with the current iteration of the software (Software Testers Are Test Pilots). Automated testing is critical as you can create checks for thousands of situations to run extremely quickly each time any changes are made to the software. But it is not sufficient. Many situations can only be explored and experienced by a thinking software tester that uses the software and thinks about how a user might react and how that user could be confused or disappointed by the existing user experience.

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• How Downsizing is Handled When Management Respects People

  Developer #1 is the guy you want to lead your development team. He will take a project and run with it, and it will come out better than you had hoped. He’ll find the fatal flaws in your specifications, either propose a change or work around them as appropriate, and do it in an extensible way that will save you time in the future. He really is the cream of the crop....

  Developer #2 is the guy you need if you already have a lead developer and he needs a code monkey who can get code out that works the first time...

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• How to Build a Great Software Development Team

  "Without confidence, honest debate about ideas is suppressed as people are constantly taking things personally instead of trying to find the best ideas (and if doing so means my idea is criticized that is ok).

  ...

  This is also one of many areas where the culture within the team was self reinforcing. As new people came on they understood this practice. They saw it in practice. They could see it was about finding good ideas and if their idea was attacked they didn’t take it nearly as personally as most people do in most places."

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• The Defect Black Market

  ...It is simple to blame employees for taking such action. But the management that setup such a system deserve more blame. This type of manipulation is what is encouraged by managers that think management means setting up such simplistic, senseless systems (Why Extrinsic Motivation Fails). This is one more example of forgetting the proxy nature of data (among other things).

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• Gobbledygook

  How is this for Gobbledygook? Your home banking access code is expired! You must change your access code at this time. Your access code:

  * may be between 4 and 20 characters in length
  * must not have been changed within the last 0 days
  * may not be one of 3 previously used access codes
  * must not repeat the same character more than 0 times
  * must not contain 0 characters from previous access code
  ...

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• Improving Software Development with Automated Tests

  ... Thus automated testing mistake proofs the process. Now the mistake proofing is only as good as the test that are added. Software development is complex and if the code has an error (based on the business rules) that is not tested then the code can be deployed to production and affect customers. Automated software testing tools are a huge help in preventing many errors from affecting customers.

  It seems pretty obvious but until the widespread adoption of agile software development techniques and frameworks that make it easy to adopt automated testing (like Ruby on Rails) this sensible process improvement tool was used far less often than you would think.

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• Amazon S3 Failure Analysis

  Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a service providing web hosting. The cloud computing solution has been used by many organizations successfully. However the solution has experienced some problems including failing for much of the day on July 20, 2008.

  Amazon publically shared their evaluation of the failure and plans to improve.

  During our post-mortem analysis we’ve spent quite a bit of time evaluating what happened, how quickly we were able to respond and recover, and what we could do to prevent other unusual circumstances like this from having system-wide impacts.

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