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Your speaker
David Ziffer
www.ProjectPro.com
630-879-0620
Connect w/me on LinkedIn
The coming revolution in software productivity:
Eliminating useless variation in
software development
Part 0:
A vision
of a not-too-distant future
Imagine we are cruising along on our
current course. As software managers we
spend our days thinking about ….
Methodology
where we hope to gain maybe a 5% gain in productivity
and ….
Libraries and Frameworks
where we hope to gain maybe another 5% gain in productivity
and ….
Tools
where we hope to gain maybe another 5% gain in productivity
Then one amazing day ….
Someone comes up with a fundamentally different way
of building applications.
Instead of gradual, fractional changes in productivity,
people are now able to write apps in half the time, or
maybe even one third the time.
A revolution takes place.
Everything we were doing before becomes irrelevant in
the face of this change.
The only problem is ….
This new system and all its documentation
are written in Hindi.
Or maybe Mandarin.
But don’t worry.
Your future is bright.
Orange, that is.
Part 1:
The past
Hardware: a billion-to-one improvement
in fifty years
1960: 16 bytes per cc
2010: 16 GB per cc
Hardware gains were made by active
management of products & processes
1950
1990
1960
1970
2000
1980
2010
In comparison, software progress is
pretty lackluster
1975: C
2010: C#
Software management focuses
on three types of changes
• Methodology (Waterfall, Agile, etc.)
– Waterfall & Agile are 40 years apart
– but unlike core planes vs. LSI, people still make a case for using either
– suggesting that the efficacy is something less than spectacular
• Libraries (and frameworks)
– completely eliminate the task of coding, but only for particular functions
– they do not fundamentally change the production efficiency of the code
that still must be written
• Tools (particularly compilers)
– These are the only software innovations that have fundamentally
changed the efficiency of writing code
Arguably there have been only
three significant gains in software productivity,
and all are in the area of languages
• 1950s: Assembly language replaces machine language
– (1000 to 1)
• 1960s: Structured languages replace assembly language
– (100 to 1)
• 1980s: Object-oriented enhancements improve structured
languages
– (10 to 1)
Language changes are getting fewer,
further apart, and less effective
• 1950s: machine language -> assembly
– 1000 to 1 improvement at the dawn of computing
• 1960s: assembly -> structured languages
– 100 to 1 in ten years
• 1980s: structured -> object oriented
– 10 to 1 in twenty years
• 2010: it’s been 30 years and nothing much new yet
Part 2:
The present
Software today is produced in the manner of
pre-assembly-line cars
• Small groups of craftsmen build apps one at a time from the
ground up.
• Every app is improvised to some great degree.
• Different construction methods are used at various times even
within the same app, according to the tastes of the individuals
working on it, i.e. there is plenty of useless variation.
Small groups of craftsmen build apps
1910
1980
There’s plenty of improvisation
1910
2010
And there’s plenty of useless variation, leading to
expensive development, poor reliability
& high cost of ownership
Useless design variation is the rule.
Even within the same app we are likely to find
multiple implementations of:
– database table structure (keys, status fields, etc.)
– table-access functions in the database (insert, update, delete,
read)
– database-access functions in the application (ditto)
– business logic structure including
• data transformation (between database and UI)
• validation
• error handling
– user interface structure
Enforcement of coding standards tends to fail:
– Training in the use of standards costs money.
– Enforcement of standards costs money.
– Use of standards is generally at the option of the
developer, who may not subscribe to them.
– The value of standards is apparent only to those who
understand long-term profitability.
– Most importantly: use of standards imposes a guaranteed
extra short-term effort that must be tolerated in order to
potentially benefit in the possibly distant future.
Since we don’t tend to have standards,
our concept of quality control tends to center around
post-mortem inspection:
– A code review performed after a lot of bad code has been
written is expensive and ineffective:
• Why didn’t we help the programmer up front to produce what was
expected?
• We probably can’t afford to rewrite the code and even if we can,
we’re late.
– A testing regime can only tell us whether the code happens to
pass a limited set of tests. Testing does not tell us whether the
code is well constructed, i.e.:
• whether we can impute from the design whether the code will pass
tests that we can’t afford to run
• whether new staff can be easily assimilated
• whether the code can be changed easily without fear of breakage.
Something has to change
• Most programmers do not have the training or experience to
efficiently or correctly build most of the components of most
apps.
• Unless we stop assigning them such tasks we cannot improve
productivity significantly.
• Giving programmers frameworks and libraries is not enough;
this does not fundamentally change the way applications are
built.
• Changing & refining methodologies is at best an exercise in
low expectations.
Part 3:
The future
Meaningful productivity gains are always
implemented through technical management
• Non-technical management cannot possibly create or
enforce innovations in programmer behavior.
• Since productivity-enhancing revolutions are always highly
technical in nature, non-technical managers cannot
implement them.
• Management by the “feature list and schedule” actually
impedes productivity improvement by forcing technical
managers & programmers to improve products and processes
at their own risk.
Henry Ford was technical manager
No non-technical or non-automotive person could ever have conceived of
the automotive assembly line
"1913 - Trying out the new
assembly line"
By an unknown photographer,
Detroit, Michigan, 1913
National Archives and Records
Administration,
Records of the Bureau of Public Roads
Steve Jobs is a technical manager
No non-technical or non-computer person could ever have conceived of
(or stolen) Apple’s many innovations.
Apple’s least memorable years were under the
direction of a non-technical CEO
You cannot substantially improve a complex technical product or product
line by merely applying veneer and promotion
What is the potential here?
Consider just one aspect of the change from
assembly language to structured languages
• Prior to structured languages, every programmer had the latitude to
design his own parameter-passing conventions.
• Consequently, conventions were typically different from app to app
or even within the same app from function to function.
• Program writers consumed a lot of time creating such conventions.
• Program maintainers spent a lot of time decoding such conventions.
Let’s shoot for the ideal …
In an ideal world programmers would have to think about only three
things that are fundamentally different across applications:
• the data model
• the business rules
• and the user interface
How do we get there?
by getting rid of the “real world” …
In the real world programmers are mostly consumed with
reinventing:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
data modeling
database access in the database
database access in the application
business logic technology
error handling
UI component management
UI design
So how do we get rid of that?
First we must reconcile ourselves to an unpleasant reality
Significant software productivity gains always
come at the cost of developer freedoms
• Assemblers prevented programmers from diddling with address bits,
but rewarded them by letting them modify programs without
rewriting every instruction containing an address.
• Structured languages hid the vast majority of underlying code from
the programmer, but improved productivity by vastly reducing the
amount of code written by hand.
• OO language enhancements are largely voluntarily and depend
heavily upon programmer competence; consequently they have
had less impact.
Innovations that do not restrict programmer
freedoms have relatively little impact
• Libraries create tremendous economies by eliminating the
writing of some code entirely, but only for the functionality that
is implemented by the library.
• Methodologies arguably have little impact on overall
productivity.
We get to the ideal by eliminating useless variation
in software development:
• A new paradigm must define a standard program architecture to be
used as the basis of the vast majority of common applications (i.e.
database-based business apps).
• A complete prototype of the standardized architecture must be the
basis of application development. It is not enough to tell or show
programmers how to do things; rather they need templates.
• To conform the prototype to the specific needs of each application
(different schemas, business rules, user interfaces), the prototype must
contain code generators that generate customized code in a
standardized way.
continuing …
• The prototype and its generators must support standard conventions
for constructing:
– database tables
– database code
– data-layer tables & related components
– business rule structure
– user interface structure (especially, keeping business rules out of
the UI)
• The prototype should contain complete implementations of standard
components that perform generalized functions (such as an objectrelational-mapper [ORM]).
Keep in mind …
The objective here is not to build a system that survives for all time
and defines application structure forever:
•
Modern car factories do not look exactly like Henry Ford’s original assembly
line. His specific implementation was not the point.
•
The point was that the assembly line specified a very detailed plan for building
a car, far more specific than anyone had previously imagined.
•
The assembly line demonstrated the fantastic economies that could be
obtained through detailed standardization.
Recommended Reading
RAP Standard Four-Tier Architecture
Generating a table
-- Person
create table TBcrmPerson
(
--#include "PrimaryKey.sql"
-- non-indexed fields
DateOfBirth
Gender
GovtIdNumber
DTDateTime,
char(1) null,
varchar(20) null,
--#include "CommonFields.sql"
)
Describing a table row
For every table, RAP generates:
const string Description = DESCRIPTION
You could change this to:
const string Description = "person '[GovtIdNumber]”;
But we actually do this:
const string Description = "person '["
+ DataTables.TBcrmPerson.ColumnNames.GovtIdNumber
+ "]'";
Using a foreign key in a description
RAP generates:
const string Description = DESCRIPTION
You could change this to:
const string Description = "name '[First] [Middle] [Last]’ of ‘{PersonId}’”;
And actually we write:
const string Description =
"person name '["
+ DataTables.TBcrmPersonName.ColumnNames.First
+ "] ["
+ DataTables.TBcrmPersonName.ColumnNames.Middle
+ "] ["
+ DataTables.TBcrmPersonName.ColumnNames.Last
+ "]' of {"
+ DataTables.TBcrmPersonName.ColumnNames.PersonId
+ "}";
Describing cascading behavior
For every relationship, you describe what happens to the children when the parent is
deleted:
and what happens to the parent when the children are deleted:
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Your speaker
David Ziffer
www.ProjectPro.com
630-879-0620
Connect w/me on LinkedIn
“You can’t inspect quality into a product.” – W. Edwards Deming