We have discussed craft software development in several previous posts. While I personally like software craft production methods, as a software architect I want to understand how to make software development more efficient in mass production environment.
Software mass production has several distinctive characteristics:
- Developer working in such environment faces large amounts of code she/he is not familiar with; often it is legacy code written years or decades ago by somebody who is not available anymore. There is no much time to learn the code; the developer must become productive on that code very soon.
- One can’t assume that a developer working on the code will have skills level higher than average; having a developer with low skills must not be a risk.
- Cost/time to market considerations are of paramount importance.
The first point means that developers often are not familiar with the code they are supposed to work with and have very little time to learn it. This is a big problem, but there are ways to alleviate it.
The code should be broken into relatively small modules with very clearly and explicitly defined boundaries (even at the level of code repository) and contracts between them. My observation is that time necessary to learn unfamiliar code grows at least as square of the code size as the latter increases. Having it broken into well encapsulated modules helps to reduce the amount of code that has to be learned.
A better design also helps to understand the code (see here) as well as other basic techniques.
All necessary elements of the code must be explicitly described by the code. You think it is always the case, do you? Not at all. Think of dynamic languages - for those languages type definitions that are important parts of the code (code metadata) do exist in developers heads only and never expressed/documented explicitly. Or think of implicit agreements that are used in Perl. You can find much more examples if you look around. While such things may be not a big problem when a developer knows the code she/he works with well, this is a big problem in software mass production and as such must be eliminated.
The second point means that the code base and the tools must be such that even a beginner developer will produce a code of good quality.
While having code modular and explicit definitely helps, I think this is more about proper tools. Think, for example, about differences in how strings are defined in C++ and Java. While C++ strings caused countless problems, a way strings are defined in Java just eliminated completely the type of issues.
Basically for software mass production we have to choose deliberately tools that do not allow common problems to happen or at least warn about possibility of them happening. We better help the developer to avoid problems than rely on her/him to fix them.
This is not just about software languages. Think, for example, about differences between Maven and Ant. Ant is a sort of free-form tool while Maven is much stricter and prescribes certain ways of doing things. Maven is obviously better suited to software mass production.
The third point is of paramount importance for software mass production while it is of little to no importance to open source and lesser importance for software craft production.
Let’s suppose your company has a problem it wants to solve by developing certain software. There are two options: a technically excellent solution (architecture/technology/design etc) and just satisfactory one. Which one would you choose? The first one? Not so fast – you haven’t yet considered all important inputs for the decisions. For software mass production we have to consider cost and time (this is business after all).
Let’s suppose the first solution will cost $10M and it will take 5 years to implement while the second one will take 9 months and will cost $0.9M. Now advantages of the first solution are not so obvious, right?
Let’s add one more input… Your company has just $1M budget for developing the solution and if it is not available within a year, your company will be out of business. Given this, which solution is better?
Cost/time considerations are important for all choices we make in software mass production, not just big ones. They are exact reasons why developers working in software mass production environments e.g. should use modern IDEs as opposed to just vim or another text editor, should use object-oriented languages as opposed to procedural ones (the procedural ones are 5 times more expensive to develop – see here), etc, etc.
Probably, there are more issues that should be considered if we want to have efficient software mass production. But those three look to me as the critical ones. Disregrad of any of them will likely cause many problems.
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