Monday, December 01, 2003

Craftsmanship, Management and Measurement

Joel Spolsky shows that he really gets it, with this piece on Craftsmanship and why it is too expensive as a method for commercial software development. Joel prefers the Design approach described by Donald Reinertsen. As Don points out in various books and articles, knowledge work is all about creation of information. Once you have the right and complete information, design stops and production begins.

Crosstalk, the Journal of Defense Software Engineering, has a special on management this month. It includes pieces by management bloggers, Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby, as well as a book advertising piece by Boehm and Turner. My eye was caught by “Back to Basics: Measurement and Metrics”. As an exercise for you the reader, you might like to compare the approach discussed here with the simplicity of the model in Chapter 5 of “Agile Management…” - WIP Inventory (number of client-valued functions in process), Lead Time (time to code a client-valued function), average cost per client-valued function and quality (number of bugs per client-valued function). One linked reference looks interesting, “Goal Driven Software Measurement - A Guidebook”. I haven’t had time to read this yet. However, it caught my eye - having just written a book about goal-driven software engineering. However, compare the length of this piece on metrics at 189 pages with Section 1 of “Agile Management” which is about the whole lifecycle process including marketing, at a mere 150 pages.