Thoughts On Software

Beginning in the era of the industrial revolution, managers were trained and encouraged to focus on increasing productivity though increased efficiency.  This trend has continued into modern management with techniques such as Total Quality Management that focus on identifying and eliminating waste in a system. It can't be denied that this approach can be very effective when applied to a consistent, repeatable process like a manufacturing assembly line.  However, this focus on efficiency is inappropriate and even detrimental  when applied to creative, problem solving activities like software development, and unfortunately these lessons learned from manufacturing dominate the way software development is organized and managed.  It even influences some of the practices taught under the banner of Agile. This fallacy, that software development can be organized into consistently repeatable processes, was the assumption of the waterfall methodology.  Software developm...