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How software development managers can do their part to stop and reverse the quiet crisis unfolding in software development leading to low quality applications, unhappy employees and unhappy users.
The reason I'm sharing this is because over the last ten to fifteen years I've noticed a quiet crisis unfolding in software development leading to low quality applications, unhappy employees and unhappy users. Silver bullet solutions keep creeping into our awareness (Scrum, anyone?) and predictably keep letting us down.
This is almost entirely the fault poor management — or perhaps it should be called fad management. In the past I was to blame as much as anyone until I discovered and refined a basic set of practices that for the most part cause everything else to fall into place — at least in my experience. No promises. Here we go.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2016, @04:06AM
Great ideas. You go first. Can you get funding to "do some subsystem the right way", or re-do an existing one that is bloated and insecure? Better yet, make sure the sponsor agrees that the result should be put back into public repository (GNU style).
My experience has been in managing a few engineering programmers for the last ~25 years. We work on contract for big companies and it is extremely rare to find a customer that is willing to pay extra to sort out the problems with existing code. They all want their extra feature crammed in somehow.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday May 30 2016, @05:22AM
I certainly don't see what is going to force sanity on the industry. Will probably take an actual attack and hundreds of thousands of casualties. Then we will do something stupid that also won't work in a panicked reaction and years later we might do something sane.
And some of those big customers DO have a clue, just not the ones in the tech business. Ever wondered why all that Cobol and Fortran is still running? Because it works. It is essentially an example of my "frozen code" idea in action.