What Gartner Is Telling Your Boss

Littlewink writes, "Esther Schindler's latest analysis reveals what Gartner is telling your boss at their annual conference. Excerpts: '"The future of application development is not about programmer productivity," said [Gartner analyst] Hoyle during the keynote presentation, "but in assembling functionality from components." [Gartner analyst] Veccio stated "Why would you ever code an app from scratch again? Why would you need to?"' According to Schindler (who does not 'drink the Kool-Aid'), Gartner urges managers to consider better process control and governance, managing 'application portfolios' much as they do stock portfolios. Part of this discipline is 'killing development projects early and often.'"

Comments

Bits & pieces

[fenodyree]

Why would you ever assemble wisdom and business savvy when it's simpler and easier to assemble random quotes & concepts from popular seminars and "Best Seller" managerial books.

Your boss is just an object

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember.. your CEO is just business object--- I set of components and business logic. His job responsibilities are just more components.

Any of these business objects can be swapped out and replaced willy-nilly as you see fit. If the CEO has too much work on his hands, you can simply run a process scanner against his position-- the process scanner will highlight the areas for improvement. Then you hire a new person and assign some of the objects to him.

Heck? Want to replace the boss? Fire him and hire a new object to assume the responsibilities. The transition is seemless.

Don't forget that you paid some consultants $1 million for this study, and these are the conclusions.

---

Look-- looking at things as components is a useful exercise for modelling. It's an easier way to get a "big picture" perspective without getting mirred in the details.

But it will only get you so far, because DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS. Anbody who believes in such object-oriented drivel is certain to go out of business. Trouble is, the CEOs who promote this crap can jump from ship to ship-- not all of us can do that.

Re:Scope creep?

[kfg]

What is the unit of scope

Fathoms.

KFG

Re:A little more context...

[Jim Hall]

For example, a project that has had three baseline adjustments because of scope creep is already in trouble.

For example: Duke Nukem Forever

Sorry ... too obvious, had to do it. :-)

While we're talking about random quotes

[hayden]

Here's one I got from an article a while back:

So there it is: IT analysts are basically corporate technology therapists. But there are other ways of looking at it, one of which was put succinctly some years ago by Charles Wang, the billionaire chairman of software giant Computer Associates. He was asked to assess the quality of Gartner's researchers. "I want to choose my words carefully here, so I'm not misunderstood," he said. "They're a bunch of fucking idiots."

Ya done it

[Quiet_Desperation]

...that they themselves are a brand. They sell their methods, scope and delivery as of the highest quality and strongest reliability. They have an established market, cater their style towards the "executive" woodgrain model, and compete with an ever-stronger ear to the ground: the 'net and specifically the tech blogosphere.

You just blew out my buzzword detector. Expect a repair bill soon, Jackson!

Re:I do 'middleware', and I also do 'supercomputer

[ozbird]

And Intel are coming up with these 80-Core chips.

The 80x86?

I think you got that quote wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

What the quote should have read is...

"'You can improve productivity by 20%', Hoyle advised, 'by killing management consultants when you should: which is early in the lifecycle.'"

CPAN is components

[helixcode123]

I think the the basic idea of using tried-and-true-and-robust components is a good one.
It's why I prefer coding my projects in Perl. The components available from CPAN make
practically any task quick to develop and robust.

Perfect PHB Logic.

[twitter]

kill development projects early, "and often," he said, "if your failure rate is high." You can improve productivity by 20%

By killing all of my projects, I'll have a failure rate of 100% but I'll do it 20% faster. Awesome!

Thanks, Gatner.