Outsourcing is the business practice where a company uses outside firms to do select projects and special work that might normally be performed within that company. Some examples of what might be outsourced (besides software development) include payroll processing, shipping and distribution, and accounting. You are essentially sending your work to be done by an […]
We all live in a world of scarce and limited development resources. (If you don’t call me.) At the same time the pressure to deliver more, and faster is increasing. We jam ideas into the pipeline looking for resources to perform and often the items all look the same. There is uncertainty. Everything gets back […]
To sum up everything posted previously. Doing these “discovery” or project planning properly we are really just applying Lean on a larger workflow. The people deciding what should do into a product development process are assisting in planning it is releases to the user base. The batch sizes are smaller and only what we know […]
Using “Lean” our focus is rightly on being fast and removing delays. We work to reduce WIP as a means of addressing throughput, rework and bug injection. We also often implement some sort of inventory management collaboration with the client to make sure we are working on the right stuff first. There is also the waste […]
This post is a follow up from a previous post, is Software Development REALLY Expensive – part Two. To summarize, I will quote from the previous blog. Our industry often sets its context too small to address the question of why software is so expensive. While addressing costs, we missed optimizing the other side of the […]
Is Developing Software REALLY expensive – Part Two
The Lean Software and Systems Consortium conference in Atlanta left me with a lot to think about. My main reason to go was to learn more about becoming a more agile enterprise but that is a topic for another day. To summarize my previous post, software projects are often categorized as “too expensive”. However, it […]
There have been many papers, studies, books, etc. on the high cost of developing software. What does this even mean? When we say software we typically mean a software product to sell to a market or a system to increase productivity. In both cases doesn’t the customer have some idea of the cost and potential […]