Building Software Teams

Chapter 1. Introduction

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde

Imagine you lived a century and a half ago, and you needed a car. Nothing fancy, just something for the occasional family visit. Obviously, it would be the variant that needs a horse in front of it, and it would be called a “carriage.” Given a period in the mid-1800s in which carriage-making was not yet standard practice, your only option would be the local blacksmith. Carriage making was a craft, not an industrial process, with a unique result each time (so not with a fully predictable result). In addition, carriages were very expensive relative to disposable income: few people could afford their own carriage.

Fast-forward to 2016. Even if your town still features an artisanal blacksmith, that is not where you get your car(riage). Except for very special hobby cases, cars are manufactured by the tens of thousands on assembly lines, in an industrial process. This process is so predictable that two cars of the same model and color can only be distinguished by their license plates. Relative to disposable income, they also became a lot cheaper.

This predictability is a result of a mature industry, in which processes are standardized and highly automated. Of course, a comparison with software only goes so far. You do not need to build identical copies of the same software system for different users and the functionality of a car is fixed during the manufacturing process, while software needs ...