Matthew Hopkins, chief executive at London, UK-based Dunstan Thomas Consulting, told ComputerWire: In order to remain competitive and to protect their jobs, software development teams have to make sure that their processes are as effective as those of the offshore providers.
Indian applications maintenance and development vendors have been keen to push the quality of their development work to the forefront of their marketing, through accreditations such as SEI CMM (capability maturity model for software) levels.
Hopkins said too many software programmers treat systems development as a black art and need to impose more standard processes and methodologies. He said: People think about developing software in a way to minimize the risk of project failure. What they should also be doing is to use a repeatable approach to development so that they are not over-exposed to the knowledge of an individual.
Hopkins referred to this key individual in the development team as IT Bob and believes many companies are in a vulnerable position as the know-how that underpins most of their IT systems is concentrated in one or two people who could leave the company at any time. Hopkins said IT Bob may not necessarily work for a client company, but could also be a developer working for an outsourcer or third-party systems integration company.
Dunstan Thomas has issued a best-practice guideline to help companies overcome their reliance on IT Bob that encourages clients to use modern development methodologies such as the Rational Unify Process. These are designed to enable systems to be written that can be amended in line with business change, and new functionality added when needed.
Hopkins said another way to tackle this problem is pair programming, where two people work on the same development project at the same computer. One programmer has control of the keyboard/mouse and actively implements the program and the other observes their work to identify errors and think strategically about the direction of the work.
He said: The quality becomes higher because there are two sets of eyes. It may seem like the productivity of the development team will be reduced, but having just one person hoarding the product knowledge will ultimately impact the team’s productivity in a negative way.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
