Russ Miles: At the heart of great software are great people

By Caitrin McCullough

Here's another post by Head First Software Development author Russ Miles. Enjoy!

Yesterday I got to thinking about what was the one thing that characterizes successful software development, and after a while I actually realized that the answer is fairly simple. In a nutshell, it's all down to:

People.

Or, more accurately, great teams made up of people. To give you a flavor of where I'm coming from, see if the following feels familiar to you:

"You've got the whizz-bang CASE tool (Computer Aided Software Engineering for the rest of us), the mega-bucks software modeling environment, and a plethora of other tools that would have the best development teams at other companies crying into their buckets with desire. You've got every book on best practices, you're following the "guaranteed to succeed" process, and you've even hired the best team of people you could find. You're using the hot language, you've got more computing horsepower than the average human-beating chess player, and you've got a set of manageable user stories for a great product and yet still...

... your project is failing."

Sound familiar? Been there? I know I sure have. So what's the problem?

It's going to sound a little weird, but people write software. I've been in environments where this is completely forgotten, and it's actually easy to see why. People are hard to get right. It's much easier to get in a hot piece of technology than fix a soft issue, like why "Dave" is not working well enough.

But people really are at the crux of all the techniques we talk about in Head First Software development. All the techniques we concentrate consider the people involved, because without people you just don't have any software being written. We're not alone in this emphasis on creative teams and if you want to know more then I heartily recommend "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" [1] to give you even more context on how to software development teams are run effectively.

The lesson is really simple although getting it right can be tough, but keep at it because the rewards are fantastic! If you want great software developed and delivered then make sure you look after your people, because without them you get nothing done (regardless of how much you spend on tools).

References:

[1] Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

 

 

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