Entries Tagged 'Software Development' ↓

“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” - Muhammad Ali

I’ve written in the past about how we need to embrace and even seek out risk at times.  Since I used American Football to discuss the topic before, I thought I’d continue the discussion with an example of poor risk management from this past weekend’s games.
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One of the common complaints you hear in Resource Management Software development is that you’re not working on anything Cool.  There’s just something pedestrian about writing software that (at its core) monitors hardware.  I mean, there are exceptions, some stuff that we do is really cool, but it’s seldom capital letters Really Cool, like, say, VMware.  Or video game development (which I imagine is fairly pedestrian in itself, but at least has an output which your average in-law can appreciate).

But yesterday I sat in on a meeting about something that is Pretty Cool, if not Really Cool.  And it’s not even software.
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I’ve been involved in software development for over a decade, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this question: Who owns this code? Generally, if someone has to ask, it’s already a bad sign, but the real bad sign is what comes next.  “Oh, Bob used to own it, but he left the company, and then it was Kumar, but he transferred over to the other team, now I guess Sue could probably answer questions about it,” but nobody owns it.

Well, that last part is seldom verbalized, but it’s on everyone’s mind.
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In my continuing effort to add to the cluttered world of sports analogies in business conversations, today’s post covers a rather sensitive topic to this Tom Brady fan.  You want your quarterback to get sacked once in a while.
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Netflix, the popular rent-movies-by-mail juggernaut, recently announced that a little-used feature called “Profiles” was going to be eliminated in September of this year (see commentary on this here).

I thought that it would be fun to give Netflix a little free advice about what can happen when you remove features from a software product. I was on a team that faced some of these issues (EMC ControlCenter StorageScope, in going from version 5.2 to 6.0).

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I’ve attended three JavaOne conferences. I have Java T-shirts, little Java toys, notebooks, pens, pins, mugs, you name it. Books galore. Somewhere I have a picture of myself and several other EMC employees posing with the Java mascot, grinning stupidly. I’ve written more Java code than I care to remember, and evangelized it over the years to many audiences.

So why do I feel like I just got stood up on prom night?

Because I stopped and read the licenses, that’s why (or, technically, someone else read them, and clued me in).

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A product struggles with quality and stability, and a mandate comes down from on high that quality is now Priority One. Checks and balances are put into place, cultural adaptation begins, and slowly quality and stability become a point of pride instead of pain.

In the process, innovation and creativity are compromised.

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