REFLECTIONS ON WEEK 6 LECTURE:



We started the lecture with a revisit to the Avalanche case as there seemed to be some confusion about the case. To help us understand the point of the case a little better, Allen had each table split into groups and then sketch an organigraph. The transceiver was the in the middle and the sketcher was the product owner or project manager. The considerations were the market and the development of the product.


Each group was asked to sketch features under each which they thought were relevant and to identify links between features under each heading if there were any links.



THEY WRITE THE RIGHT STUFF



Charles Fishman

This was a very interesting article and an enjoyable read. What struck me first about this article was the fact there are very few late nights in this environment. I suppose that's a testament to how successful and professional they are as a group of software engineers. It's also down to the process they have for developing the software where a lot of the work is done before they even consider writing the first line of code. The specs they write for the what the software needs to do are immense, coming in at around 40 thousand pages. The fact that the spend the money in a different place to most software development in other organisations means that the blueprint for the code is very rarely changed once the writing of the code starts. This is the opposite to most software projects in other organisations.

What also struck me was the high percentage of women at senior level in the organisation which bucks the trend for software engineering in general.

I also noticed a comparison between this paper and the Soul of a New Machine where there was adversarial teams set in place. Personally I think this is a good approach as it tends to up the performance within a team, in that they don't want to be undone or outworked by the other team or in this case they didn't want the other team to find any errors in their code. I was also impressed with how they handled errors in those rare occasion that they occurred and the detailed process they had for recording these errors with the aim of avoiding them in future.

I suppose the process has to be this detailed and almost 100% perfect when there is so much money and peoples lives at stake.
Full Post