Have you heard the pitch for the tool that gives a 600% productivity improvement, or the new programming language that will solve all of your problems? Matt Heusser explains that confidence games abound in software development—and suggests what to do about them.
Confidence Games in Software Engineering
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Nice article, it shows why not to trust get-rich-in-6 -months companies and false promises that work only in theory.
“ESB that hooks into a SOA that enables EAI back to the original ERP system” – WTF is that supposed to mean anyway ?
Yet another marketing blurb.
If something is too good to be true, it probably isn’t true; this saying genuinely helps one get through life better, even if it inspires cynicism.
Another truism I’ve found is that any abstraction involving people is less than 70% accurate. People are complex, and there’s no accounting for all the factors that are involved in managing them. So you should be happy if a system that promises 30% improvement manages 20%. Of course, nothing promising more than 15% improvement is ever realistic. If there ever were a company that did things 20% better than other companies, they’d blow them out of the water.
I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, I’m saying those kind of improvements tend to get noticed by themselves without any kind of marketing
The only way I have found to accurately increase productivity reliably is to replace management with a magic 8 ball. The answers you get tend to be more useful. This is of course if the person asking the questions has some common sense.
I migrated one of our file servers/auth server from Server03 to Fedora, and the difference was like night and day. The users really liked the improvements and the speed up. On hearing of this, one of the top guys, who noticed the improvement-but didn’t know much else-commented that he could believe it, after all didn’t I read Microsoft’s Get the Facts. Ugg.
Once again, best tool for the job, not marketing spin.
Best tool for the job seems to acquire a double meaning here