Hello there, It has been more than a year when this question comes to my mind and triggered ideas in my brain.. I was focused on my MSc studies in software engineering at the university and i was trying to figure out if software development should be considered as an activity of "engineering" ? or "craftsmanship" ?
When we talk about engineering, the most important part of engineering is to provide models and verify the model based on quantified datas so that you can build tools based on your models... When we talk about craftsmanship, its more chaotic... We just don't know. It's about the craftsman who matters. If we have skilled people, our product is good... Timothy Lister and Thomas De Marco has a famous quote about this fact " It's not about technology, it's about people..." And I believe this statement is true. Is there any research about this proposition ? Definetely... Let's check out The Chaos Report from the Standish Group.. They say, 81 Billion $ wasted because of cancelled or challanged software projects in USA. Wow. 81 Billion dollars. What was the necessary budget needed for US to overcome financial crisis ? 700 billion ? almost 1/7 part of it wasted for cancelled software projects... But why ? why ? why ?? If we are talking about engineering, this shouldn't happen. Can you imagine a construction project have the same failure rates ? No way ! But why software engineering ? We liked this question and told ourselves, "if it's about people, and yet software development is craftsmanship... why not focusing on dev`s ?" so we developed an addin integrated with visual studio called dev \ efor which monitors your development progress in terms of code and effort metrics... It measures the Code Metrics and shows the progress ( trend ) of the projects you are working on and also, it measures effort metrics and let you answer such questions like "how much actual time spent while i was working on this particular project" We used this addin with some real life projects and the results are interesting... At avarage, a standard developer spents 1.5 hr to 3.5 hr actively using visual studio. The maximum rate for a standart developer works in front of VS IDE is 40 minutes in a hour. If we consider a week, the avarage working hour in front of VS IDE is 1.5 hrs. It's really interesting... We provide this addin free and it's in beta stage right now.. when we finish with it, this client add-in will also be free. What we aim to do is, if the community use this addin and share the results with everyone, we believe the academicians and involved engineers may identify the patterns and we can make better estimations with the data provided by the community. Therefore, we might contribute a little to eachother so that we might save that 81 billion dollars wasted money for good. You can download this addin from www.devefor.com/download and please let us know what you think... I am monitoring this forum. Thank you so much if you read so far : ) Cheers ! Ersan
