Software delivered on time or good software
Submitted by Andy_B on Wednesday, 03 June 2020 Page Views: 368
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The big question we are considering today is “Can you have good software delivered on time?”. We're looking at recommendations from author Adam Grant, who during his career saw projects ran in many different ways, such as following the waterfall model, true agile and has also seen agile developments fall dramatically. He classifies projects by the way the deadline is handled.
1. Introduction
In software development, as in any other sphere of activity, it is essential to make the right choices to get the desired outcomes. To get there we must ask the right questions, like IT outsourcing or in-house development? If you choose to outsource, things suddenly become easier. But if you choose in-house development, you will have to face many questions and choices.Therefore, we have two types of projects.
The first type has a fixed deadline. In this instance, the scope of the project was likely reduced along the way, corners were cut and the final product became “uglier, less maintainable, bug-ridden and, plainly speaking, suckier version of what we set out to do initially”.
The second type of project has a flexible deadline. In this instance, the deadlines exist, but are not set in stone and quality is always chosen above on-time delivery. In the author’s opinion, this method of organizing a project offers the best results and has the happiest developers.
2. Creativity, craftsmanship and unpredictability
Creativity ties together many elements of the software development process. The correlation between strict rules, motivation and procrastination has been analyzed by author Adam Grant in his book “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World”, where he says: “Employees who procrastinated regularly spent more time engaging in divergent thinking and were rated as significantly more creative by their supervisors. Procrastination didn’t always fuel creativity: if the employees weren’t intrinsically motivated to solve a major problem, stalling just set them behind. But when they were passionate about coming up with new ideas, putting off the task led them to more creative solutions.”. The author of the article presents creativity as a double-edged sword, saying: “It’s important to note that more creative freedom begets more trial and error to reach the solution”. He explains that creative freedom is related to tinkering, which is described in the MacMillan Dictionary as: “to make small changes to something to improve or repair it”.
Craftsmanship in software development represents a way of caring for your work, and also letting the quality of it define you. Because you can make software that will work “on the outside” but “on the inside” it will be a buggy mess that barely holds itself together. The author suggests a few good practices: writing complete tests, code pairing with other colleagues and taking time to fix the “ugly” parts of the code.
Unpredictability characterizes many steps in the development process. The position that ties the expectations and commitments with the creativity and craftsmanship of the software developers is the Engineering Manager. Trust is also a big factor in the process. Trust lets you negotiate timelines honestly and realistically or lets you implement uncertain deadlines.
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3. Conclusion
Balance is the most important element of the whole development process. Applying creativity and craftmanship in a project with a well-negotiated timeline and an acceptable deadline is key for having the best results and the happiest developers.With many thanks to Dennis Stachel, Kristian Bjornard, GDC Europe, Arobs and the Aspiration Nonprofit Software Development Summit for their kind support and assistance with this article, including Creative Commons photos.
