Two Egg McMuffins Please, Technology on Demand

 think the key to delivering successful software development orders is a sincere, honest desire to bridge the gap between the business people who ask for and use software systems and the technical people who create and deliver them. Acknowledging, accepting, understanding and celebrating differences is key to building a greater, more productive whole. There are hopeful signs from all directions. Almost everyone is interested and excited about technology. Visual development tools and software patterns are becoming capable of providing blueprints that can be used to both build software systems, and to communicate the design to anyone accurately and intelligibly.

Written 19Jun2006 by Dr. Stephen S Kelley, CTO hawthorne direct inc

I have an egg McMuffin addiction. I live in a small town, and because of my addiction, I’m on a first name basis with most everyone at the McDonalds in my town. This morning, I ordered two Egg McMuffins from the drive through and discovered a block down the road that I had been given only one. I drove back, explained, they sincerely apologized and gave me another. It was a very positive experience for me. Mistakes happen, but there is a strong relationship and clear communications quickly, easily and cordially work things.

Getting the software systems you want should be this easy. Hardware, bandwidth, software, and development platforms are more powerful and cheaper than they have ever been. In some cases, the order may be a little more involved than two Egg McMuffins, but the principles are the same. On the basis of a firm relationship between trusted and honorable individuals, clearly communicate what is expected on both sides of the transaction, execute the transaction, and work out any misunderstandings or mistakes to everyone’s satisfaction. It’s no different than any other healthy relationship.

From a theoretical perspective, it should be this simple. The experience is that it is very rarely this simple. The underlying reason is that there is almost always a wide communication gap between the people requesting/using software systems and the people delivering/creating them that is not effectively bridged. As Dilbert highlights, the people on either side of this gap seem like different species from different planets.

There is a big difference between technical brilliance and practical ability and achievement. In my former life as a physicist, the practical goal was to formulate and solve interesting problems. Extracting the low-energy phenomenology of a given string-inspired grand unified quantum field theory was a standard exercise that anyone with sufficient knowledge and practice could do. Picking an interesting theory to do this with is an art that nobody understands, but a few people have an almost magical ability to do. A successful, modern, digital, on-line business needs both the magical knack to envision an interesting/profitable business and the technical brilliance to implement it.

Building a skyscraper, house, bridge or road is often used as an analogy to building software systems. Although this is an excellent and useful analogy, like most analogies, it is not exact and breaks down for many purposes. Most any coverage of software development covers this analogy and its limitations, see Chapter 2 from "Software Project Secrets" for example. In a large building project, the investor communicates the vision to a general contractor who executes the vision through subcontractors employing specialists in the needed disciplines. In a smaller building project, people take on multiple roles and in the extreme one person embodies all the roles.

Software projects are much the same. Organization, communications, and good relationships are the keys to success. However, the differences introduced above often make software projects much more difficult. Most everyone understands what a hammer does, but few understand polymorphism. Building techniques and tools are fairly stable and mature, but software methodologies and platforms have become obsolete in a few years. On the other hand, the softness of software, the growing modularity, plug-ability and compos-ability of component software offer a level of agility far beyond that of hard construction. My article on Windows Workflow Foundation in Advertising discusses one example of modern agile software development platforms.

I think the key to delivering successful software development orders is a sincere, honest desire to bridge the gap between the business people who ask for and use software systems and the technical people who create and deliver them. Acknowledging, accepting, understanding and celebrating differences is key to building a greater, more productive whole. There are hopeful signs from all directions. Almost everyone is interested and excited about technology. Visual development tools and software patterns are becoming capable of providing blueprints that can be used to both build software systems, and to communicate the design to anyone accurately and intelligibly.

Perhaps the most exciting sign is more and more people, especially young people, who embody both brilliance and practical ability. Dilbert and his pointy headed boss are merging to produce a bold new race...a well rounded human being!