Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile

1.4. Drucker's Challenge

Defining software development as knowledge work doesn't allow us to ignore the issue of productivity. Productivity and quality are still very important to the success of a business venture. The management guru Peter Drucker forecast the emergence of this issue as long ago as 1969:

"Knowledge work is not easily defined in quantitative terms, ... To make knowledge work productive will be the great management task of this century, just as to make manual work productive was the great management task of the last century."

—Peter Drucker (1969)

How you measure productivity in software development is a good question. It is most certainly not lines of code, function points or hours worked. Still, no matter how difficult it is to measure, we are producing something and we can always improve productivity and quality. Perhaps we just have to live with this ambiguity.

Any attempts to quantify software development productivity must make allowance for the multiple results of such work. In developing a piece of software we create a deliverable executable, but there are by-products. The developers themselves increase their stock of knowledge – about their tools, about the subject of the software and about the creation process. Similarly, managers, users and others involved with the specification, implementation and delivery of the software will learn as a by-product.

Despite the problems of measuring productivity, we can still discuss the issues, and we can still ask how ...