David M Williams
Sunday, 19 July 2009 20:03
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Tom DeMarco is co-author of one of the most timeless and seminal works on creating software, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Yet, this month DeMarco suggested to the IEEE Computer Society that maybe software engineering has had its day.
Most any “must read” lists for those involved in the development of computer software will include
Peopleware which was first published in 1987 and updated to a second edition in 1999.
Despite its age Peopleware remains relevant because it doesn’t focus on the technology of software but rather the human element.
Consequently, when DeMarco makes a pronouncement people listen. Perhaps not as many as when Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs or Linus Torvalds speak, but DeMarco has a dedicated following nonetheless, of professional practitioners of quality software around the world.
One such pronouncement is
DeMarco’s opinion piece in the July 2009 issue of “
Computing Now” magazine, a publication of the
IEEE Computer Society titled “Software Engineering: An idea whose time has come and gone?”
This is eye-catching on multiple levels. Besides the DeMarco authorship the title proffers the surprising and unexpected view that software engineering is a dying concept.
Actually, it’s been DeMarco himself who has long pioneered the modern understanding of software engineering. Prior to Peopleware he wrote
Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement and Estimation.
This first line of this 1982 title has been quoted extensively in the ensuing 27 years. DeMarco wrote, “
You can’t control what you can’t measure.” To solve that problem software engineers have bravely attempted to uncover and analyse as many software metrics as possible.
Yet, DeMarco now reveals with the passage of time he has become uncomfortable with the views he originally espoused.
“Implicit in the quote (and indeed in the book’s title) is that control is an important aspect,” he says, “maybe the most important, of any software project.”
“But it isn’t.” He now says, citing examples of GoogleEarth and Wikipedia as impressive software products that proceeded without much control.
To illustrate his changed reasoning DeMarco refers to two hypothetical projects. Both will eventually cost about a million dollars. Yet, Project A will produce value of around $1.1m and Project B will produce value exceeding $50m.
It’s obvious that Project A absolutely must have tight controls. If the budget is exceeded or the software is delayed or the quality is lacking then the project runs a real risk of running at a loss.
By contrast, Project B has such a vast difference between its cost and its expected return that control can be relaxed. Obviously, matters of costs and deadlines and quality remains but ultimately the project is going to turn a profit. It would take things to really go haywire for it not to.
Thus, DeMarco muses, in reality the more a manager focuses on control the more likely they are to be working on project that is actually striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.
