Leadership By Numbers

"Software development has been, is, and will remain hard," according to Grady Booch. His perspective is worth appreciating, and not just because he is the author of many best-selling books on programming and hundreds of articles on software engineering.

In his latest blog entry, Booch comments about the awful FBI catastrophe with a tracking system gone bust and suggests that many projects fail because of a combination of factors:

1. a failure of imagination,
2. extreme overengineering,
3. a benign neglect and lack of involvement of the needs of the system's various stakeholders,
4. and a failure to grow the system incrementally and iteratively.

Training ought to be a fifth entry.

As someone who provides training services, I see the inevitable results of poor architecture and weak design from professionals who lack in depth knowledge of the processes in which they work. Systems are unstable, applications have clumsy and confusing features, and no one is ever pleased with a slow, unresponsive, inflexible infrastructure--even when it was built on the cheap.

SD Times has a couple of essays which touch on this fifth cause. Allen Holub writes that it takes longer to "develop mediocre programs than it does to produce good ones."

Though excellence is important, it’s not innate. You achieve excellence by superb training and constant practice. By superb training, I mean classes taught in the flesh by experts in the field, not online courseware churned out by some education mill. The online stuff is no better than reading a book—it’s not useless, but you get what you pay for.

Your best bet is to educate your existing staff, not replace them. Sure, good training is expensive, but the cost in lost productivity is more expensive. You can’t afford not to do it.

And, David Rubinstein, the SD Times editor, argues that companies must begin to make sizable investments in training.

The value of training and education cannot be overstated. It is the foundation upon which the global technology arena is based. Yet despite years of warnings of worker shortages and a talent pool ill-equipped to handle the newest—and oldest—technologies, it still represents too small a part of most IT expenditures.

It's time to take training seriously. Maybe, this year will be different.

I hope I'll see you in class.