I realize you follow the RedMonk travel calendar in great detail (either on our fresh and clean home page or in upcoming), but I thought I’d call out next week’s travel none-the-less as courtesy to you, dear readers, least you have to keep abreast of all those data-sources:
- March 22nd to 23rd, 2007: South-Central Tivoli User’s Group Conference, Austin. The last one of these was great in that there were several demos and reactions from Tivoli users. The CMDB demo was nice.
- March 25th to 27th, 2007: Microsoft Management Summit 2007, San Diego. PowerShell! Maybe some acquisition news as last year? Better bone up on SML too.
- March 28th to 29th, 2007: Adobe Analyst Summit, New York. Thought I’ve been to several Adobe events, I haven’t been to an analyst summit. Should be fun!
There are several other events after this, but I’ll use the thrilling travel date content as bait for checking out <a href="http://upcoming.org/user/104423/"the RedMonk calendar page in upcoming or the handy footer on our main page ;>
Technorati Tags: tivoli, tug, sandiego, powershell, mms, mms2007, adobe, adobeanalystsummit, adobeanalystsummit2007
Cote,
I'm not really in to agile stuff, but I've been thinking a little bit lately.
Plenty of great products have been created, launched, developed and maintained both with and without functional specs. You can create great products in Java or in Ruby. Video game developers do amazing things with console assembly languages (!) and C++ (!!).
The real key is having great people. It's not so much the details of the process that matter, it's about people and communication. That means that hiring and recruiting are amazingly crucial and having great (but reasonable) working conditions is, rather than being reminiscent of dot-bomb decadence, unbelievably important. In a factory assembly line, the people are cogs. In creative mental labor, it's the opposite; the tools are just tools and it's people who make or break things.
Therefore I think "people over process" is profoundly apt philosophy.
Elaborate, useless specs created when you know the least about the problem at hand and ridiculous development processes like waterfall are just crutches to hide weaknesses in teams. It creates the illusion of collaboration and productivity. But really that's nonsense and what really matters is the people. This may seem like a truism but software management philosophy does not, outside of a few rockstar places like Google, really understand it. And certainly bloodsucking VCs who think they know it all don't understand that.
VCs like Guy Kawasaki want developers to be cogs (he's said this multiple times) that are "plug 'n' play" but it doesn't work like that. Entrepreneurial activity and startups are inherently risky but I bet if VCs believed in people over processes success rates would be a lot higher.