(...) Economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to size, output, or scale of operation, with cost per unit (of output) generally decreasing with increasing scale as fixed costs are spread out over more units of output. src: Wikipedia This sounds so reasonable & generic, it's has been also empirically proven for traditional (related to "physical" goods) industries. No wonder that this universal law is being solemnly applied in building software products: when things progress too slow, add more developers to build a new product, form a large-scale project to increase testing efficiency, increase release…
All posts in software development
If you haven't yet, check the part I first. Where were we? We've figured out that your job may wave you good-bye & go to Fareastan. But it doesn't conclude the consideration just yet ... Is the growth inevitable? Are we completely sure that software development is on permanent rise? World is crazy about software, everyone wants to build new "digital" services, but if you give a bit of consideration: how much of this stuff does actually bring real VALUE (other then brief, hedonistic moment of pleasure because of doing something trendy)? Just check the mobile app stores -…
These are great times to have a software developer career & I've written a lot about that already. There are tons or open positions available & they are all very well paid, when compared with other industries - we all know that. But the key question is - when will this bonanza end (and how)? Demographics 101 "India is now producing almost one million new IT graduates a year (...). Contrast that with the UK, which struggles to release fifty thousand engineering graduates each year." "The End of Jobs", Taylor Pearson It's 20 : 1, if you didn't…
Do you recognize any of the following scenarios? Continuous influx of requirements put you into permanent death-march - you're always struggling against deadlines, there's never time for refactoring, unit testing, etc. Firefighting is your bread'n'butter - issues pop up on daily basis here & there, so there's never time to fix (or even locate) the root cause or go through thorough post mortem. You've reached the point when each quantum of work you do is burdened with enormous "tax" - hence huge efforts result in dripping value. There are just too many dependencies, architecture is too coupled, procedures…
There's a common saying: The truth will attend to itself. Quite naive one, I'd say. Sadly, it sometimes doesn't work even in the world of IT (supposedly based on scientific & engineering fundamentals), especially near the boundaries between engineering & other disciplines where everyone considers himself an expert (or at least pretends to be one). So, frankly speaking, bullshit is everywhere. Plenty of bullshit. Marketing bullshit, sales bullshit, ignorance bullshit, insolence bullshit, hype-rooted bullshit, opinionated bullshit, trolling bullshit, ... Classification of bullshit seems to be grow into the separate discipline itself these days :) So let's have some fun - what is…
We tend to think about software development as a very special & unique "discipline", positioned somewhere in the middle between science, engineering, craft, even art. And in the end we keep finding out that the same patterns & behaviours we observe everywhere else, apply in software development as well. One of the truly interesting (& to some degree - surprising) cases is ... Cargo Cult What is cargo cult? In short words it means mindlessly copying elements (without true understanding of their role) of existing solutions (usually not our ones) in belief, that what we'll shape that way will…
There are more and more open software developer positions in the market. And it's not just about quantity - breadth & variety of roles, technologies, platforms & languages continuously increases - to the satisfaction of all of us. But if you look carefully at the full spectrum of offers available, you'll notice that NOT ALL job offers are about ... ... technologies / platforms considered "modern", "promising" or even ... "alive" ... building new, exciting features / services / products (even partially) ... creative work - design, modeling, using modern dev practices, methods & extremely versatile tools (like multi-purpose programming languages) to…
Some time ago I had an interesting discussion with one of my colleagues regarding what is the typical thing that goes wrong when software delivery project turns out to be unsuccessful. Many of the reasons we've identified were not really revealing: new, unknown, bleeding edge, unproven technology - comments are unnecessary, but let's assume we play safe (just for sole purpose of this article) wrong product built - something that is not really needed, doesn't fulfill true needs, etc. - it's a very important point, but let's agree that we focus here just on the technical delivery process, not actual…