Software Product: Art , Engineering or Marketing
As with any new discipline, software application development once upon a time an art is fast and definitely becoming engineering. A product of engineering is generally reliable, robust and has the desired quality. It is for this reason that different disciplines emerged in the industry.Today there are clear demarcations in developer, tester and project managers.In spite of all the structure,we know that if bridges were designed like software then there would be a lot of ferries operating.
Generally,in the software industry,it is thought "uncool" to follow process. A constraint to creativity is often cited as the reason for not following process.This feeling is more prevalent in the product companies and less in software services where process are followed in letter (if not for the spirit).
QA Engineer or Tester: While the rest of the engineering industry have moved from mere defect finding to finding out the root-cause of the problems, software "engineering" still suffers from this self-image of being more art than engineering.
A Feature development workflow
A process flow diagram of a simple feature workflow would be:
Requirements -->Development ---> QA/Testing
Product managers is come up with requirements for the next generation product.He is implicitly measured on the number of requirements which is authored.
Developers job is to create software which satisfies the requirement.However, he is implicitly measured on how fast he can churn out the features.
Testers test the product.He is implicitly measured by how many defects he files.
There is no alignment in each of the measures to the business goal of an organization. I have often found that the importance of the business goal. is completely ignored. Consequently, the product gets caught in interdepartmental warfare.
Product managers are commended for the number of requirements, developers for the number of lines of code and testers for the number of defects.
The customer is still left unhappy.No doubt all work hard, but is it relevant to the customer's need is the question to be asked.
Solution:
As for many problems existing the world today, the solution can often be found in the discipline of marketing.
"Understand the End Customer"
Product managers are commended for the number of requirements, developers for the number of lines of code and testers for the number of defects.
The customer is still left unhappy.No doubt all work hard, but is it relevant to the customer's need is the question to be asked.
Solution:
As for many problems existing the world today, the solution can often be found in the discipline of marketing.
"Understand the End Customer"
The solution is simple because it is relevant.However,to change the mindset of the software development practice would need active facilitation.
No comments:
Post a Comment