Recently my company organized a nice conference about software agility and building an agile company. Among the speakers were Jeff Sutherland and Dean Leffingwell - two names that are very well known in the agile community. We had dinner with Dean on one of those days and were looking at the software industry from high and above (do not remember the context really but that is not that important for my point) and then Dean made a remark that made me think for a while. He noted that software rots a lot and that's the reason we (software people in general) keep getting hired, so we would write the software (again) using the new cool platforms and APIs of the day.
As good as this may sound for software people I wonder what kind of perception business people investing in IT have of us. Do they feel uneasy every time they hear about the need to invest in re-writing the information system they have just started using the last year because you see the database has to be upgraded since the vendor is putting an end to that product, and now has a new more expensive product with more features. These businessmen probably wonder what happened to the "soft" in "software". And they get crushed with acronyms if they try to say "but ... do we need that?' - SOA, REST, AJAX, WEB 2.0, WSDL, WPF, WWF, WCF, etc. You get the picture.
Imagining these things I figured these people that are the real customers of our industry are probably not real happy. Probably feel more like bullied into it then really buying into it. I mean they need IT there is no way around that, we have put them in one big vendor lock, haven't we ;)
So what is stopping software people from really making the customers happy? What would it take to make software that is long-lasting and easy to adapt to new platforms and APIs?
To be continued ...
04.11.2008
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Flokkur: Agile | Breytingar
Höfundur: Petar Shomov