Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

If you manage software development, here is a tip for success: write less software.

The above tip for success doesn’t make much sense at first, but humor me by reading the following story (a true story).

Once I worked in government, and we hired a company to write software for us. The software dealt with scheduling resources. We paid the company about $3Million to write this software. What a mess. The software eventually worked, but it was painful to writer and painful to test and painful just to be in the room when people were talking about this software development effort.

Time marched on.

A few years later, we wanted to upgrade the system for new use. A new software development manager arrived at the company. He suggested that instead of upgrading the software, we throw it away and use Microsoft Calendar software instead. Microsoft had already written the software, and it would provide about 90% of the functions we needed. He wanted to write software that would interface with Microsoft’s and add the custom features we needed.

We did as he suggested. They finished in one month. There was no pain.

Let’s think about this story a little more:

The company would have been paid a lot of money to upgrade their software, that is if they had written a lot of software. Their solution meant less money for their company. Their solution also meant success for their company. Everyone was happy with the result.

Upgrading the software would have meant writing a lot of software. The company wasn’t good at writing a lot of software. They would have earned a lot of money, but would have failed.

How many failures can your company accumulate before people stop hiring you?

Think about it:

• writing a little software is easier than writing a lot of software
• writing a little software takes less time than writing a lot of software
• writing a little software costs less money than writing a lot of software
• writing a little software has fewer headaches than writing a lot of software

Hmmm, what are the advantages to writing a lot of software? I don’t know.

If you are a software manager and want to succeed, try to find ways to write less software. In this case, less work usually means more success.