Such Big Sounding Words

Software Application Lifecycle Management

Business Relationship Management

Process Management Leadership Organization

These are such big words, and it’s just too much. And it fully represents a big part of what’s wrong with enterprise applications.

Let’s suppose you write (to use my boss’ favorite example) insurance software. There are tons of regulations in this line of work. Your ability to be agile or even modestly flexible with your coding styles and standards are severely limited. And you should know that before you go into that line of work.

I work in a big enterprise, but I don’t write enterprise software. Most of the applications I work on are used by 20 or fewer employees. But they still want to apply all of the standards and methodology for the little one-off applications as the big ones.

And that’s wrong. Every developer sees it. You can’t apply the same rules to the little as you do for the the huge. Well you can, but…

Exactly.

A one-size-fits-all solution fits no one. Big projects are delayed no matter how much management is involved. Where I work, this means years of delays. (Does the presence of management cause delays? Discuss.) And little projects are small enough that anything beyond the basic source control documentation means that you spend more time documenting than doing.

I really like iterative development. So do my fellow programmers. As far as I can tell, so do our customers. They like the speed and responsiveness. They like seeing their application grow just as much as we like building it. I’m mostly certain that everyone likes iterative development except for management, especially because of the scope creep that, in my experience, comes along for the ride in iterative development. Scope creep messes up signed estimates and previously contracted delivery SLRs. Me? I like scope creep. It means that I’ve shown the customer they hadn’t thought of, and it should make the program more valuable.

So, anytime you hear the phrase, “Let’s lock down this database,” you should run. Run far, far away.