Daily Archives: March 16, 2007

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Why software projects fail

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Martin Fowler and Dan North from ThoughtWorks gave a keynote at QCon entitled The yawning crevasse of doom; this refers to the tendency of those who develop software not to communicate with the beneficiaries of the software – users, business people etc. This was a recurrent theme at QCon; addressing this problem strikes me as a primary characteristic of agile methods such as Scrum. It helped me to understand that most software failures are caused not by technical issues but rather by communication problems. Of course communication failures can occur within the development team as well as between developers and other stakeholders; Kevlin Henney and James Coplien mentioned the perils of “throwing architecture over the wall” in their session on Agile Architecture is not Fragile Architecture. If architecture is divorced from coding it is likely to fail. It further follows that improving the software development process is more to do with improving how teams function than it is about tools or even procedures.

I find this a healthy corrective to the reams of PR I receive from vendors implying that their tools can prevent project failures. They love to quote figures from the Standish Group which allege that most software projects fail. This is the cue for a marketing pitch explaining the benefits of their application lifecycle tools. I am not against application lifecycle tools; one of their purposes is to enable better communication. However, it’s unlikely that landing new tools on dysfunctional teams will bring about improvement. It’s better to fix the team, which is a management issue, and only then to resource it with the right tools.

What is the team? In reality, the team is everyone with an interest in the outcome of the project, not just developers.

The snag is that it is much easier to buy new tools, or indulge in other forms of deckchair rearrangement, than it is to address the real issues that are preventing the team from functioning – maybe issues of personality, geography, or inappropriate management structures.

 

internet, search

Microsoft attempts to buy search share

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Microsoft is giving enterprises incentives to use Live Search instead of Google or Yahoo, according to a ComputerWorld report; John Battelle has more details.

Buying search share is nothing new; the Mozilla Foundation apparently gets a ton of money from Google for making it the default in FireFox. This is just another skirmish in the search/toolbar/gadget wars; the stakes are high, because search is the user interface of the web.

I doubt the strategy will have much impact, unless Microsoft fixes what really matters: the quality of its search engine.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of search today. I was reminded of this during a recent presentation on software usability. Speaker Larry Constantine made an example of a feature in Word: how to insert a caption for an image.

Problems like this are easier than they were in the pre-Google era, for the simple reason that users are now able to search for the answer. Try it: Google for “word insert caption” (without the quotes) and up come dozens of postings on the subject. Quicker and better than online help.

Since the ability to search efficiently is now a key productivity factor, it follows that businesses should think twice before allowing themselves to be bribed into enforcing search preferences. Better to evaluate the search engines, and maybe give some training in how to use them.

 

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internet

Farewell to the Times Reader

Fired up the New York Times Reader today, to be greeted by a message:

This note is to let you know that the beta period will be ending in two weeks. Times Reader will launch as a subscription service on March 27. It will cost $14.95 a month or $165 a year.

Times Reader, you will recall, is a fantastic WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) application for reading online content. It works offline and nicely demonstrates how rich Internet applications can improve on web browsers.

In one sense I have no quibble with the price. I believe journalism is worth paying for; and $15.00 a month is not excessive.

Unfortunately it’s not good value for me, nor I suspect for many others who have tried the beta. For starters, I’m in the UK which makes much of what is in the NYT of less interest. Second, I have access to a ton of free content – starting perhaps with bbc.co.uk along with innumerable blogs – and I don’t have time to read as much of that as I would like. The subscription model makes no sense for this kind of general content.

The NYT would do better to continue providing free Reader content. Give subscribers some extras like premium content, or earlier access to articles, or less intrusive advertising.

I understand the pressures though. It’s an unsolved problem.

 

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software development

Scrum: good but not that good

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Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of the Scrum development methodology, gave a talk at QCon on Agile Project Management: Lessons learned at Google. The session was packed; I’m realising that this is as much an Agile crowd as it is a Java crowd.

This was a fascinating session though not in the way that I’d expected. There was a fair amount about Google but not that much about how it uses Scrum, more about the overall characteristics of the company, its flat, team-based management structure, and of course how much money it makes. There is plenty of good sense in Scrum; it facilitates communication, surfaces problems, and promotes sane prioritisation. A key insight is that software development is not just about technology; it is also about people. “Scrum is the only process that makes personal issues as important as technical issues,” says Sutherland.

That said, I didn’t much enjoy this talk. It came over more as a Scrum marketing pitch than what I’d hoped for, which was a real-world account of a Scrum implementation. Listening to Sutherland you get the impression that Scrum is the One True Way; nothing else will do. Adopt Scrum and succeed; do anything else and (if you have competition) your company will fail.

Sutherland is a master motivator. We hear a lot about success. There are little anecdotes about soldiers climbing ridges. Along with Google, we learn about another company Sutherland admires, Toyota, and its secret of success which he calls The Toyota Way.

I don’t doubt the value of Scrum as a process; but I question whether it is only right way to develop software.

 

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