Black Falcon Software: Why Software Engineering Can’t Work… (Republished)

For those technicians and technical managers that have studied the methodologies that are the foundations of quality software engineering, they like I, have been most likely very surprised to find so much animosity by their own managers towards the idea of implementing such techniques in their own IT organizations.

Unfortunately, for those of us that are ardent supporters of such concepts, software engineering is more about cultural adaptation than technique. The techniques have been refined over 30+ years by highly competent technicians, analysts, and technical managers, all who have provided quality results on time while saving their organizations huge sums of monies. You would think that such success would be enough to convince even the most persistent naysayers to opt for some consideration of this approach towards software development. The reality is though, it never has and most likely never will.

It was the United States that developed the software industry into what it is today; and for the most part we can take the blame for all of its failings… and there are many. However, the most egregious act against our profession has been that massively, incompetent business management has created a culture off subservience by IT professionals instead of one of equality while commoditizing a scientific discipline into nothing more than the equivalent of a store-bought toaster. This has always been the most difficult aspect for most people in business, no matter what their job or career title may be, to deal with; that most managers are complete failures at their jobs. That incompetence is embedded in the culture of business which is solely based upon the “greed factor” which has overtaken American corporations beyond what it was after American industrial dominance began to rise after World War II. Back then, companies were not huge institutions for the most part and those that led them had vested interests in making sure they ran with a modicum of stability and success.

With the advent of “professional management” all that was lost as they increasingly viewed only profit as their sole reason for existing. Anyone who would like to dispute this is welcome to read Joel Bakan’s (a noted Canadian jurist) excellent treatise on corporate sociology, “The Corporation”.

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Once installed, any hope of refining the Information Technology field into a truly professional career discipline was lost along with it.

For a time in the 1990s, it seemed that the It field was going to get that opportunity as young people streamed into the field making a critical change on the everyday brutality of the profession that had long been a hallmark of its existence. For a while things seemed to change for the better as the younger technicians brought with them a sense of passion for their work… but not too much common sense as so many of them flocked to the businesses that would comprise the “Internet Bubble”. Nonetheless, they were a talented lot that brought a sense of calm to the field… for a time…

That sense of calm would be quickly rolled back as outsourcing took hold and invaded the IT organizations with a vengeance. And from American managerial incompetence… and arrogance we would now be introduced to Indian managerial technical capabilities that would outstrip any ability at applying common-sense to systems and application development.

Indian technicians for the most part are wonderful people and very competent. I have worked with them for years and for the last 7 years have been the only American in several all Indian groups. However, I am talking about the professional developers, not their management.

Indian technical managers, for the most part are highly intelligent people that have a phenomenal grasp for technical detail along with memory capabilities that are equal to that task. Unfortunately, in my experience that is where it stops. Indian managers, like their less technically competent American counterparts are nothing more than “firefighters” often at odds with people management skills and quality project development skills.

Neither set of managers shows any promise in being able to comprehend the requirements of software engineering principals… and the results of their work sadly shows this. I am quite sure that managers of other ethnic backgrounds in the west are most likely no better than what I described here. And my experiences with Japanese management in the 1980s is a story I won’t go into here.

Software engineering requires precision of thought and organization. It also requires good negotiating capabilities by the technical managers that run such projects. And the technical managers that have implemented such concepts in their own areas have been able to do so solely due to their own abilities at mastering the art of specific negotiation strategies that are designed to allow people to come together and feel intricately involved in the process the technical manager is attempting to promote.

However, it’s the deadline that most often negotiates a promising project into the ground while technical managers and staff stand by helplessly while their abilities at accomplishing the task are whittled down to nothing.

While all this was happening another, completely hidden change in western culture, particularly the American part of it, was making its way into the psychology of how information would be transferred between people. From an appropriate form of transfer through discussion and documentation… and the ability to read large amounts of information rather quickly, the last 15 years or so has seen a dramatic change towards the sound-bite and the well known information “bullet-point” in business.

Gone are the days when people actually discussed business issues, documented them, and refined them through further discussion. Our world has been now reduced to “PowerPoint” mania that only allows for a miniscule amount of information to be transferred between people while being drowned in a labyrinth of utter boredom. Emails fly about with snippets of information considered to be complete documentation on any and all matters, important and the trivial. And technical staff struggle to accommodate an increasing blizzard of input on an increasingly volatile level, only to be reprimanded if they miss a snowflake or two.

The excuse, “We don’t have time for longer emails, for more discussion, for more documentation… We have a deadline…”

There is a very interesting thesis on this recent development called the “The PowerPoint Society: The Influence of PowerPoint in the U.S. Government and Bureaucracy”, written by Gregory S. Pece for his masters at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Though I find some of the writing somewhat repetitive, he does get his point across and it has been corroborated by other articles I have come across. You can read this thesis at the following link: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05202005-065041/unrestricted/PecePPthesis.pdf

I suggest you read it as it will bring home the difficulty in implementing such concepts as software engineering into most business organizations.

After trying for close to a year to bring in such techniques in one institution and seeing the less than intelligent reactions by management, I see no future for most companies that don’t employ such techniques. They are doomed to eventually collapse under the weight of their own inadequate processes in their own IT organizations as increasingly, managers of all stripes have less and less capability to deal with large amounts of information and precision processes.

For all those who continue to stick by the excuse that “There is no time…” Well they are most likely right as for them time is quickly running out…

Black Falcon