Wednesday, February 23, 2005

How much of Software Product Development is on Time?

Viewpoint of an Entrepreneur: A Business Intelligence Software Blog: How much of Software Product Development is on Time?

The gist of the post - It's about Nari's views on why Software Product Development never seems to be on time, on budget and achieving what it is supposed to achieve. He talks about the book, "The Business of Software: What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad" by Michael Cusumano. Nari goes on to say that "However, the main ingredients that make the difference seem to be the softer skills that only a fifth of the companies doing software development seem to be getting right." The bottomline is this:


It seems to come down to two things - process and people. You need to get both right. If you do not, it does not work!


Oh! This post resonates so! And how ironical! Everyone *seems* to know this but no one seems to either be able to do anything about it or know how to go about addressing this. Reasons?
- All of us think short-term and tangible.
- Long-term and intangible thinking is harder than the hardest of things to do.

2 comments:

Nathan Ram said...

This might not be a refined functional response... My viewpoint here is that:

Sometimes, a compromise in terms of time and budget here and there is inevitable... Compromise on Quality against 'budget and time' is the one which could put the company in bad shape.

That's why companies without CMM Level 5 and Six Sigma are still thriving in the market...

Veerapathiran said...

"It seems to come down to two things - process and people. You need to get both right. If you do not, it does not work!"

true..I've seen both ends of process in my work..
one that has a lengthy process that'll make you waste a lot of time moving through all the steps before accomplishing anything
the other with no proces whatsoever..it has to work that's all..doesn't matter how you do it..result is that nooneelse understands how it works and when somebody else enters the picture,its starting all over again..

FYI, the former is a big one, a fortune500 co with around 30000 employees and the later is startup-turning-to-middle-level co with around 200 people..

still looking for the place with the right combo :-)