Glenn Gruber: The Fallacy of Software Factories and the Importance of Talent
Mr. Gruber makes a number of good points in this post regarding the general tendency in IT to try to commoditize talent within the software development space. While we at Delivered Innovation employ a “factory approach” to development, our philosophy regards the standardization of the delivery process itself, and not the application of tacit knowledge to the process of creating value, as the ultimate candidate for standardization. Glenn is spot on in his assessment that many firms within the outsourcing world try and apply a factory model for the purpose of reducing development expertise to the least common denominator, and this comes at the expense of quality design…and ultimately of quality output. DI has been brought on to a number of large “cleanup” projects in the Force.com space this year to untangle messes created by these so-called software factories where developers are routinely referred to as “bodies” (as in, “We’re behind schedule, so let’s throw a few more bodies at this”), and in every case the customer ended up spending significantly more on the project using resources that may have cost less on a per-hour basis, but ended up costing more in the long run due to the watered-down skill levels and lack of insight into the big picture design and architecture.
Three key points:
…under the traditional outsourcing model success (i.e. margins) is achieved by trying to break any task down into its most basic components so that those activities can be completed by the most junior and cheapest resources.
Tools and methodologies are more like guiderails to reduce mistakes and help less-seasoned developers accomplish more advanced tasks, but don’t necessarily guarantee well written, high-performance software.
Architecting, designing, building and testing products that are tied to revenue, that require high levels of performance, scalability and resiliency is not a task to be done by lowest-common-denominator individuals.
