On 05/06/2010 10:49 AM, Darrin Chandler wrote:
On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 11:57:29PM -0300, VICTOR TARABOLA CORTIANO wrote:
The computer industry is driven by fashion instead of quality...
Not really. In all seriousness, the software development industry is
driven by companies that believe that deep down, software developers are
like brick layers: some number are incompetent, and of the competent
ones some are faster/better than others, but mostly they are
interchangeable. You want a brick layer then you hire one for the
standard price.
This notion they have is false, but there's a whole industry that sells
to them based on their misconceptions. This naturally leads to whole new
methodologies every decade or so (long enough for the new thing to
become a buzzword, get adopted everywhere, and then for companies to
discover that projects still fail and the software still sucks and costs
a fortune to develop).
The alternative is to recognize that programmers are not
interchangeable, and that up front effort in selecting the right people
and providing them with a good environment makes far more different that
going with whatever methodology is the current Big Thing. That's backed
up by studies and written about in books, but most managers do not want
to hear it.
It's not just the software development industry, sadly. This is a
convenient abstraction that many (most?) managers seem to subscribe to.
Corey
