10x Software Development - All Comments

re: Construx Job Opening: Software Development Trainer/Consultant

Steve McConnell — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:06:09 GMT

@Abhishek - fixed -- thanks for pointing those out.

re: Construx Job Opening: Software Development Trainer/Consultant

Abhishek — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:32:30 GMT

The following links

- leadership level

- knowledge areas

- Course List By Job Title

from this page appear to be broken. Could you confirm/update path for the same please?

re: Construx Job Opening: Software Development Trainer/Consultant

david — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:09:52 GMT

lovely post, i like it

re: Why Requirements Weren't More Prominent in Construx's Classic Mistakes Survey

Jeff Smith — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:05:06 GMT

Requirements challenges may be more correlated with large phased-commitment and contract-based industries. It would be interesting to see the numbers across industries, company size and ages, and government/public services. The need around budget/contract challenges, safety, compliance needs, or simply very large complex projects. Limits in choosing adaptable approaches or in obtaining easy feedback may move the burden onto requirements.

Of course, the percentages may easily have changed with the evolving technology world. With smaller projects, cheaper hardware and bandwidth, improved tools and methods, and broader competition, perhaps the dependence on perfect requirements has shifted. Certainly there are more players, many of whom are also working with totally different models. Google and Boeing play a much different game. And I would offer finally, that some who did requirements poorly, may just not be here any longer to respond.

re: Why Requirements Weren't More Prominent in Construx's Classic Mistakes Survey

Andy — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:25:00 GMT

For us, requirements issues are low percentage of the problem. We would include Feature Creep and Shortchanged upstream activities, but not as important as other areas, and the other 3 related to reqs not at all.

And I would vote against "Bad Requirements". Too vague.

re: Why Requirements Weren't More Prominent in Construx's Classic Mistakes Survey

Vince Panuccio — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 08:23:17 GMT

Very insightful. It's good to see a different survey.

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

offshore staff — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:43:34 GMT

I'm glad i reached your site and be able to read you article. Thank you for the information's.

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

Steve McConnell — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:42:16 GMT

@Rod

Yes, these failure modes exist for co-located teams, but they exist more often and more seriously for teams that are geographically distributed. With a co-located team you at least have the option to leave your door open, run into people in the lunchroom, etc. With distributed teams it doesn't work to leave those sorts of interactions to chance -- they won't happen if you don't make them happen.

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

Steve McConnell — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:40:13 GMT

@Andras

The issues with offshore captive development and offshore outsourcing are overlapping but not identical. With offshore captives, you have issues of recruiting, retention, and utilization that you don't have to worry about if you're outsourcing. You also view issues related to intellectual property and investment in staff capability differently. With outsourcing it doesn't make much sense (usually) to invest heavily in staff development of offshore staff, or to have offshore staff working on your "core" techology. With a captive offshore staff it often does make sense to do that.

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

Rod Claar — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:11:35 GMT

Thanks for the great post, Steve.

The damage of poor communication is predictable!

Unfortunately I see this in organizations that are all in the same building!

Excessive length of emails,

Too many responses in an email thread,

Phone tag as a practice, even a scored competition(!),

Closed doors and minds,

all lead to the same effects you point out.

What is it about the word TEAM that teams don't understand?

Rod Claar

http://EffectiveAgileDev.com

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

Victor — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:47:43 GMT

@Andras

Seems to me that "offshoring" implies that your team is spread across global locations. While "outsourcing" implies work being done outside your team/company.

First, I can outsource work to a company down the road and have plenty of face2face interaction

Second, the "offshoring" teams that I have seen failing are partially due to the fact that they are not consider part of the wider team, creating the "us vs them" mentality that Steve was talking about.

I think there is a large difference between managing a customer-supplier relationship and managing a team with members that are geographically disperse.

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

Andras Ludanyi — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:35:29 GMT

I understand that, but "offshoring" is just a special case of "outsourcing" where you have direct control over the resources abroad (your direct capital investment is in question). The transactional cost in this case are internal but not quite the same as operational cost. I believe everything I said about outsourcing is more or less valid for offshoring as well, unless your offshore development is an operation organized as a large number of low cost, inefficient, under-qualified bug fixing "code monkeys", but in that case no amount of travel will render you any significant improvement :)

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

Steve McConnell — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:06:59 GMT

@Andras

Note that my comments are not about *outsourcing*. They're about *offshoring*, or multi-site development in general (e.g., setting up an offshore captive). Outourcing introduces a whole range of additional issues above and beyond the issues I described in my post.

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

Andras Ludanyi — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 23:57:58 GMT

The good (and probably correct) way to think about outsourcing is not so much of a cost reduction as much of a way to free up your time in order to maximize your work on areas your advantage are the greatest. If you are looking for a simple cost reduction your business is on a wrong track anyway. Outsourcing is nothing but a "device" of division of labor, so you have two general reasons why you do it:

1. To be more efficient, so you "buy" the work items from someone who are more efficient and more productive than you in that particular area.

2. To free up your time in order to do only the things you are the most efficient and most productive (where your comparative advantage is the greatest).

During this you deal with two kind of cost:

1. Transactional cost.

2. Operational cost.

If you do something in-house your transactional cost is 0 or close to 0 and your operational cost is high, if you outsource your transactional cost is high and your operational cost is close to 0. Now you must find a point where the sum of your transactional and operational cost is the less possible while your output (productivity and efficiency) are at the highest possible level. This is the art of management. If you know how to do this, you are a happy guy, if you don't then your business is a high risk gamble.

Therefore during some projects you will probably need to travel to your outsourcing vendor/partner often and during some other projects less often.The way to minimize waste (that is actually the only cost reduction you can do without loosing efficiency and productivity) is to have adequate capability to manage your project. Simply cutting travel will hurt you, cutting unnecessary travel is OK, but cutting travel which is essential to you management process is a straight way to disaster.

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

Steve McConnell — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:16:28 GMT

@GO:

Yes, I think that's right. The only difference is that in many cases like you described the people involved have actually worked together for a long time before they become "virtualized." In those cases I think the "half life of trust" can be longer than 6 weeks. In the cases when we've seen that kind of arrangement work the people who are "virtual" still need to come in for about 1 week a month, or 1 week every 6 weeks to make that work.

I haven't personally seen a case in which *everyone* gets virtualized (i.e., no central office exists anymore). I would be very pessimistic about that working for more than a few months.

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

Steve McConnell — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:14:03 GMT

@Bernie Thompson:

There are lots of good reasons to set up offshore facilities, but reduced cost shouldn't be the main driver. The TCO cost savings are typically much smaller than companies expect, and labor rates in the offshore areas tend to increase over time, so there's a limited window within which cost savings will be realized. Overall if a company is offshoring primarily to reduce costs it will probably not realize its objectives.

Good reasons include getting access to other markets, gaining intelligence about other markets by hiring people who actually live there, ability to hire staff more quickly than you might be able to hire it i specific places domestically, access to specialized skills that you might not have locally, and so on.

Most companies seem to have concluded that you need 25-100 people offshore to make the idea viable. Practically speaking this means small companies probably shouldn't be going offshore. We've heard a few stories about smaller offshoring arrangements working, but they seem to be the exception and usually involve people from each location actually living at the other location for awhile (i.e., an exceptionally high level of face-to-face time).

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

GO — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:18:06 GMT

I have been looking for an article that describes this problem so clearly. It also hits on another scenario more and more companies are moving to in order to reduce costs: Virtual Office Development. As a matter of fact you could take this article and replace all instances of "Offshore Development" with "Virtual Office Development" and you would have my situation exactly pegged.

More than a year ago my Company decided to close some of its smaller R&D locations for "cost cutting reasons". They offered Developers the option of moving home (Virtual Office) or they could leave. Having been with the Company a long time...enjoying the work that I do...and believing the overall vision and strategy of the Company...I chose to stay. After all, there are many, many perks to VO for both the employee and the Company. Management stated that they knew the key to success in a VO deployment was having the VO employee visit the home office every 3 - 6 months. Life was good...for awhile...

What happened? Well, the economy went down...travel restrictions put on...and how long has it been since the last time I (or anyone) has been face-to-face in an Office with other team-members? Almost a year. What is the result? Most of the consequence bullets listed in this article. Couple this with all the things companies are doing to survive the economic crisis (furlough's, no bonuses, no raises, no 401k match, etc...) and you now have yielded a very, very toxic environment.

These are very, very tough times...and it seems to be a global problem. I just hope that the economy turns around soon...for all our sakes.

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

Bernie Thompson — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:57:38 GMT

Thanks for writing this post Steve! It's always good to hear others struggling with similar issues.

So, if it turns out there is a shift towards more caution about offshoring and multi-site development as a side-effect of the downturn -- at what point (and for what types of organizations) is that a good or bad thing? Have big organizations been overeager about offshoring, or have they generally struck the right balance? How about small companies that embark on it early in their growth?

Would be great to hear what you've gleaned as best practices for deciding when in the growth of an organization or company the pros of multi-site/offshore outweigh the cons, when it's crazy, and when it's essential.

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

The Other Steve — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:24:31 GMT

Perhaps this is the reality of the poor value proposition of offshoring setting in?

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

nappisite — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:51:41 GMT

In my limited experience with offshoring, I'm most intrigued by the statement "I can't think of a single case in which offshore development has been successful for a company that didn't commit to significant face time between teams at different sites". In my very small company, we've attempted offshoring twice with little to no face-to-face time. This, I guess, is the result of not fully committing to offshoring. From my perspective it seems like, as a company, we're looking mainly to add capacity quickly and cheaply. However, the cost goes up if we're shuttling developers back and forth to India or China regularly so we don't do it.

What strikes me about what you're saying is that face-to-face time is a requirement to success. I'm wondering if this is a question of scale? As a small company without the dedicated resources to "manage" the offshore team, nor the resources to send developers back and forth, the burden falls on the internal development team to coordinate and train the offshore resouces via phone, IM and email, which slows productivity on both ends. That's my experience in practice anyway, and it seems, anecdotally, to cost more to offshore than just hire more internal staff. I'm wondering at what point does a company reach critical mass where the relative cost of dedicating resources to managing the offshore effort and paying travel cost balances with the production gleaned from the offshore team?

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

Jérôme Radix — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:34:51 GMT

It also depends on the kind of software development project. For certain intranet Web applications for example, companies are not requiring a good level of quality (wrongfully or not).

So even if the actual cost is taking 5x the cost that would normally be required if people where knowing well each other, as the man/day cost is 5 to 10x less than a European or American web developer man/day cost, at the end, the companies has still some cost reductions by using offshore services and having a "no travel" policy.

re: Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development

Peter Williams — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:38:50 GMT

As you say this was predictable, given that offshore development was driven by cost-cutting in the first place.

On the positive side it should benefit smaller software companies who are driven by value creation.

This is also an opportunity for US and European companies who work effectively with overseas partners or divisions to create some competitive advantage.

re: State of the Practice Survey

ANSH @chemistry educational software — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:50:30 GMT

hi,

your post is very interesting and very informative. You have given wonderful information about the software development.

Thanks for sharing the information.

re: Free Webinar: 10 Deadly Sins of Software Estimation

anonymous — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:34:10 GMT

We are expecting this kind of useful presentation.

re: State of the Practice Survey

Andy — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:39:11 GMT

You posted this July 4th?