Change Management

The software development business, once the domain of a few advanced technology companies, is now pervasive. Why? Because software is less costly and easier to modify than hardware. At first glance this is obvious; building a software telephone switch is a lot less costly than the hardware equivalent. Looking more closely, though, software products have far more features and, therefore, are more complex than hardware products. Software is easier to change, but this just adds to the level of complexity, especially on the management side. Software allows us to build products that are more complex.

The author explores the people side of peer code reviews. Besides the technical and quality benefits, peer code reviews help build better teams. Believe it!

I came across a paper the other day in Better Software titled, "Code Improvement" by Jeff Grover and Zhon Johansen. It's a short, but good article focusing on developing well-designed code. My favorite point was "Start/Finish each task by refactoring". In other words, stop the entropy of expanding your software solution by ensuring that the code is as minimal as necessary to meet the requirements. There are parallels in the CM world that ultimately lead to a reliable CM process and tool support capability. In this article, I'll venture where I don't usually go: inside our own development environment to bring out a few points that may apply equally to general development and to a CM environment.

"Sometimes," Bob mused, "It seems like senior management doesn't care about the quality of the systems we build. I wonder if they care about quality at all?"

"Oh, there is no question in my mind!" Sue assured him. "I know that they don't care. All they care about it hitting a schedule. They couldn't care less about how well the software works!"

Meanwhile, in the boardroom:  "What's wrong with your people?" the COO barked at the CIO. "They can never seem to deliver a system the works right. Between the bugs that have to be fixed and the difficulty that people have with figuring out how to use it, I wonder if we might be better off using pencil and paper!"