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Software Accountability Made Real?
An Anonymous Reader writes "In a recent presentation and post, Kent Beck (eXtreme Programming, Embrace Change) highlights Open Quality Dashboards as a means to make software development accountable. Many different approaches attempt to reduce the number of issues creeping in all along the development process. Whether a shop abides by the rules of up-front UML design or test-driven development, or a methodology somewhere in between, the ongoing burst of popularity for tools enabling continuous integration and frequent releases shows the need for unit testing to appear earlier in the development process. In this context, quality dashboards could well establish a credible benchmark for software accountability."
That's EXACTLY it. At our shop, we got sick of being blamed for "taking too long on projects" - so we got together, got up to speed on Personal Software Process and Team Software Process, and started a development lifecycle and process improvement team.
There are a number of interesting benefits to this. The best one so far is that we maintain a 'responsibility trace' right from individual stakeholders in Management, to each requirement, to each design element... we can actually tell who in management has a stake in a particuliar _block of code_.
The other neat thing is, the execs can make changes all they want. We really don't care. Because we're on a fixed 3-week development cycle (all the way through the cycle each 3 weeks, culminating in a release) we can either say "sure, we'll do that in the next build" or "scratch the current cycle and we'll do that now". In the latter case, we only lose a maximum of 3 weeks work. Not bad at all, and if management complains, well, we can show them WHY we lost 3 weeks. They shut up pretty quick.
Unfortunately, convincing management that the paperwork we end up doing to improve and maintain our process is a Good Thing, is difficult. If we aren't coding, we must not be working, right? Wrong. Now we have nice graphs showing number of defects in our software falling through the floor, time spent fixing defects falling through the floor, developer productivity skyrocketing... It's fantastic.
Bottom line: Management in some places doesn't WANT responsibility. They want to hand down directives from above, and we are the magical little gnomes who make their projects at 1/4 their salary, if we're lucky. If they go sour on a gnome for whatever reason, they want to be able to fire with impunity. Process is the way to make them eat their own crap whether they like it or not. They WILL end up liking it, and you get your life back.