One goal for a process designer is to make their process straightforward to learn and remember so that following it becomes habit as quickly as possible.
When we examine two developers writing a software application in their spare time we see little that we would call a formal process. However, when we examine a project with hundreds of developers distributed across multiple locations working to develop a large software system, process often seems to be all we can see. Both examples do have process, but the first is much simpler and very informal. It is most likely maintained wholly within the minds and interactions of the two developers who, over time, have learned to communicate very effectively with each other. In larger projects, the processes tend to be both much more visible and much more formal, although you will still find many small ‘processes’ in a large organization that are hidden, ‘understood’, or part of the tribal knowledge and not recorded anywhere. In fact the processes (not necessarily productive processes) that last the longest are those that become habit; ‘it’s just the way we do things here’. One goal for a process designer is to make their process straightforward to learn and remember so that following it becomes habit as quickly as possible.
So what are the fundamental differences between two developers writing software in a garage and thousand-person, multi-million dollar software development efforts?
Those who work in the real estate industry tell us that the three most important aspects of real estate are location, location and location. The software development process equivalent is communication, communication and communication. Communication is taking place constantly within a software development process at every level. In fact, no process (work) can occur without it! In failed projects, communication, or failure of it at some level is usually a major contributor to the project's downfall.
If we consider developers as nodes in a communication network all potentially linked to each other by communications channels, then there is only one channel between our two developers in their garage.
However, as we add more developers, the number of potential communications channels grows geometrically.
Between four developers there are six potential communication links. Between ten there are forty-five potential links and there are 4950 potential communication links between a hundred individuals on a team.
If not managed, there will either be too much time spent communicating and nothing will get done or there will be too little communication and results will not integrate and work together.
As a team grows larger, managing communication becomes increasingly difficult.
Communication requires language. Within a development team different sub-teams use different languages. Some of these languages are textual, others are graphical and others are more mathematical in nature. There are languages for expressing requirements, defining interfaces, defining database tables, for communicating analysis and design models, for describing algorithms, for describing patterns, and a myriad of different programming languages for communicating instructions to a computer. Much of the work of a development team involves translating from one language into another ...
... and then of course, to add to the mix, there are communication channels and languages required to communicate with customers, users and sponsors of the project.
Each time we translate from one language to another there is a potential to lose information or communicate the wrong information. Errors can occur when converting statements made during verbal interviews to structured requirements and diagrammatic models, adding documentation to the models, developing persistent storage models, and even creating the code. If information is not accurately transferred at each of these ‘interfaces’, we have the potential for building the wrong system. Therefore, we want to keep the number of translations of information to a minimum and to automate as many of the translations as possible to reduce the chance information is not lost.
To further complicate matters, at each step along the way, the people involved in transferring the information may not know what they need to communicate. For example, the user defining the system may not know what it is that they really need. They may end up describing task steps or symptoms of a larger problem without actually communicating the needed functionality. So not only can we make errors in translating the information from one form or medium to another, we may not even be translating the right information! Therefore a good process uses numerous feedback loops to provide validation and verification as often and as early as possible.
Another big problem preventing communication is the fear of being wrong. If a user, manager, analyst, or developer is so scared of being seen to have made a mistake that they withhold information, clear communication is obviously compromised and the error is often compounded over time. It is right that we should have accountability within a project but our software development processes should encourage and support an environment of trust and responsibility rather than one of suspicion and fear of recrimination.
A software development process
describes what to communicate, when to communicate, how to
communicate and to whom to communicate (most process descriptions
will not tell you why; this is normally left for someone to write a
book about!).