Given enough money, time, experience, technical experience and creative input, time has shown as an industry we can build awesome things. Unless you’re working on a self-funded project with unlimited supplies of cash and time, it’s unlikely that most of us will ever have the experience of working with minimal or no resource constraints.
Software development in ‘the real world’ is really no different from any other business, and the concept of the Triple Constraint has been well understood in Project Management for some same. This describes the inter-relationship between 3 attributes of:
- schedule
- scope
- cost
and how they interact to affect quality of the final product. At a high level, it’s generally understood that you can have ‘any two’ of these, but it’s impossible to have all three at the same time. Each of these attributes translates to desirable qualities of:
- fast (deliver the product in less time)
- good (include all desired features)
- cheap (deliver at low cost)
So, you can have fast and good but it won’t be cheap, or you can have fast and cheap but it won’t meet all your requirements (some features will have to be left out).
So back to the original topic. How is software development a compromise? Invariably because your client or your company wants all these things: “we want it developed in an impossibly short amount of time (get it ready for tomorrow), we want this massive list of features (and no, we’re not prepared to leave any out), and oh by the way, we only have enough money to pay for 1 developer to work for 8 hours”.
While technology can go some way to helping produce more for less (code generation etc), the reality is that software development in the real world is not a technical problem. It is a business problem of negotiating contracts and managing expectations. For the technologist, this is the continual struggle – pretty much everything you work on will be under less than ideal conditions.
Business Driven Development (BDD). Welcome to the Real World.