Daniel Cazzulino's Blog : Software Development Productivity

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Software Development Productivity

Scott Bellware has an interesting series of posts where he discusses how to get back to productive development teams. As usual in his writing (IMO), in a rather verbose way he brings up quite a few good points. Please go ahead and read them. He links from the first entry to the next so you can follow the flow.

I agree with the analysis that unnatural organizational structures kill productivity, motivation and leadership. And I believe this is one of the reasons why even big companies turn to so-called "boutique development shops" (shameless plug there): by being small and very cohesive, these shops offer creativity and productivity levels that "mere big" ISVs can only dream of.

And it's not always only a matter of design principles, I'd add. Sometimes you need a specific area of expertise which you're better off outsourcing (i.e. Visual Studio extensibility, hardcore WCF, framework/runtime libraries, WPF/Silverlight/Blend UEX, etc.). Small shops of highly specialized professionals can save you tons of money and time. But your own dev team will certainly benefit from applying sound design principles for what matters most to your business: the business rules and logic.

posted on Monday, February 08, 2010 3:15 PM by kzu

# Software Development Productivity @ Monday, February 08, 2010 3:44 PM

Scott Bellware has an interesting series of posts where he discusses how to get back to productive development

Anonymous

# re: Software Development Productivity @ Monday, February 08, 2010 4:20 PM

Outsourcing to highly specialized shops can just as likely decrease productivity - unless productivity is already quite low and there's no choice but to turn to highly-specialized people for help.

The specific result of specialization is more costly handoffs, in-process inventory costs that gather around handoffs between specializations (let alone organizations), and flow management problems.

Small shops of highly specialized professionals can save you tons of money and time - but often it only looks that way because we have a tendency to fail to book in-process inventory to the productivity balance sheet (see: http://is.gd/7YpbG).

The most that we can say is that small shops of highly specialized professionals may save you money and time. It depends entirely on the industrial maturity in the shop engaging the specialists and how they account for work and productivity.

I'll be speaking to this in greater detail at the Lean Software and Systems Consortium conference in April: http://atlanta2010.leanssc.org/home/scott-bellware/

Scott Bellware

# re: Software Development Productivity @ Monday, March 01, 2010 8:09 AM

It's far from an accounting/registration problem.

Just sit and pair with a non-expert struggling to get the most trivial thing working in a technology he doesn't know a bit about.

I know it happened to me trying to get the most simple UI in WPF to be even slightly functional and descent looking.

Training takes time and money too. Sometimes you lack the former but have the later, so you turn to outsourcing to specialists, which makes perfect sense.

kzu