Ideas on Enterprise Information Systems Development

This blog is devoted to ideas on Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) development. It focuses on Lean Thinking, Agile Methods, and Free/Open Source Software, as means of improving EIS development and evolution, under a more practical than academical view. You may find here a lot of "thinking aloud" material, sometimes without scientific treatment... don't worry, this is a blog!
Every post is marked with at least one of Product or Process labels, meaning that they are related to execution techniques (programming and testing) or management techniques (planning and monitoring), respectively.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Effort Metrics Sophisma - Part III

This a summarization and translation to English of a presentation prepared by me and an associated researcher in 2008. It was used to support our arguments against detailed one-year plans, a demand from the management of a big and interesting project we've been taking part since 2006.


The (Tough) Software Reality
Unfortunately, software is an intangible good, produced by knowledge workers. An intangible product means that it is not possible to measure its physical features, such as weight or diameter. Production based on knowledge is also hard to measure, because it isn't repetitive: there isn't something like the industry's "medium operation leadtime". Moreover, software development is highly dependent of people*, with all their specificities, problems, way of thinking etc.


(*If MDD were really able to drastically reduce the need for programming, organizations would no longer be hiring lots of programmers ...)


In other words, uncertainty in software development comes from:
- Non-repetitive and creativity-based work.
- Constant changes in technology.
- Some tasks considered as simple behave as complex.
- Frequent changes in requirements.
- Necessity to learn about the domain area during the development
(the above arguments are also valid for defending iterative & incremental cycles...)

Second Logical Chaining
Software → intangible good, non-physical
Software → knowledge based production, knowledge is a non-physical resource
Knowledge based production AND intangible good → there is no physical metrics (by definition)
Non physical metrics → inaccurate estimates
From the first chaining:
Detailed planning needs → detailed estimates
However
Software → inaccurate estimates
Inaccurate estimates → non detailed estimates
Then
Non detailed estimates → Non detailed planning

In other words, it is not feasible to produce detailed planning for software, even when using waterfall cycles !!!!!

The central point for reaching this sad conclusion is
Non physical metrics → inaccurate estimates

I leave this hook here so that people can try to dismantle our arguments: if you prove that you can have accurate estimates without having physical metrics, the argument here is broken.

More Conclusions
Detailed planning works in the hard industry, however some people try to transplant it to the software development industry in carelessly ways. Many organizations insist in this broken model, bringing high costs to the control and (re)planning functions, and in the end the goal is not to deliver a good quality product ontime anymore, but to create a false notion of control and of showing that managers are able of "thinking ahead" (although this "ahead" is unknown in the real word...).

For business people, not being able to create a detailed plan for months ahead is something like signing up a "proof of incompetency", many prefer to create plans that need strict control and even so, their baselines change all the time. At this point, the tail starts to wag the dog...

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