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Comments: 284 +- IT: What Gartner Is Telling Your Boss on Wednesday September 27 2006, @05:10PM
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kdawson
on Wednesday September 27 2006, @05:10PM
from the rad-bad-portfolios-good dept.
from the rad-bad-portfolios-good dept.
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Littlewink writes, "Esther Schindler's latest analysis reveals what Gartner is telling your boss at their annual conference. Excerpts: '"The future of application development is not about programmer productivity," said [Gartner analyst] Hoyle during the keynote presentation, "but in assembling functionality from components." [Gartner analyst] Veccio stated "Why would you ever code an app from scratch again? Why would you need to?"' According to Schindler (who does not 'drink the Kool-Aid'), Gartner urges managers to consider better process control and governance, managing 'application portfolios' much as they do stock portfolios. Part of this discipline is 'killing development projects early and often.'"
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Technology: Gartner Touts Web 2.0, Scoffs At Web 3.0 187 comments
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Gartner tells my boss whatever anyone pays em 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically they're just another rent-a-quote firm for people who buy their services
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
More crap time is spent doing this stupid stuff, rather than getting the ball rolling and actually putting something together. I've seen projects waste their time and money on this.....and run out of both, to never get the project off the ground.
Sure, I know you
I blame Star Trek. (Score:3, Insightful)
You get everyone in a room.
You all agree that there is a problem.
You tell someone to X the Y to emit Z which will collapse the problem.
5 minutes later, the Y has been X'd and is Z'ing the problem.
The magic words made the problem go away. Quickly
... tells my boss whatever ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Gartner tells my boss whatever anyone pays em 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
While I admit that sometimes the process does get in the way, the fact is there is a good reason for 'process'. Presently, I am consulting at a place that doesn't really HAVE a process. They don't have meetings to complete paperwork or to discuss plans. They are very much into cutting edge technology. Every critical application is on the very latest OS and Hardware combination possible. They purchase the latest version of everything the very week it is released. And, their developers are busy coding away, instead of worrying about submitting documents or creating change requests.
While that may SOUND like a great place to work, the fact is, the place is a disaster. They are almost entirely in reaction mode. They never use project plans, so no one has any idea how long it will take to complete a task. That is a bad thing, if YOUR project is dependent upon someone else complete that task and you don't know how long it will take them.
They are always rushing to place a hardware order, or to configure the hardware to get it in place, because they want to have the latest and greatest of everything. Unfortunately, because most of their application vendors haven't even agreed to support the latest technology, they are either installing the latest technology without support (a very dangerous thing) or they are always on the phone to various developers, trying to get support.
Because they don't plan their system changes (using formal change procedures), I know of at least one example where payroll production crashed and burned because of an unrequested change (that is completely unacceptable when you have thousands of employees waiting for their pay stubs).
Oh, the developers? They are putting in 60 hour weeks, always juggling tasks, trying to complete EVERYTHING, because EVERYTHING is last-minute rush.
I could go on for pages, but I think you get the point.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this a "Web 2.0" shop? Because it sounds a lot like the places I heard about trying to crank out web apps back in the late 90s.
I've worked with processes and without, and the best is...just having good competent developers and a manager who can both crack the whip to get things done and shield his team from the political BS. It's only happened a couple of times, but it was nice while it lasted.
Interestingly, my last gig was with a
Not to scare you (Score:4, Interesting)
-Rick
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Consultants like Gartner can eat me (Score:4, Insightful)
This is another picture of the ugly underside of a capital-driven economy. Management reacts to the behavior of a bunch of coked-up day traders and brokers who are shooting craps with other people's money. Because "The Market" likes it when jobs are cut, managers cut jobs. Any way they can dump a few more workers is good, they think.
But the fact is, somebody's got to do the work. The managers certainly aren't going to do it because in the process of getting their MBA all they learned was that if you bought an 8-ball, and sold some to your friends after stepping on it a few times, you could get high for free. So now they're middle management and they don't know fuck-all about actually making something, or providing a service besides oral favors for their bosses.
I know this is heresy in this day and age, but it really is worth the few hours it takes to read Das Kapital. Not that I want to see a Marxist system here (or anywhere, really), but it's worthwhile to know how capitalism looks when it starts to fall apart. And falling apart it is, make no mistake.
Greed has brought us a bloody war in Iraq. It's brought us a middle class whose debt is increasing as they are told they're better off. But the only ones that are better off are the credit card companies.
Come on, let's have a show of hands: Think back half a decade. Think about where you thought you'd be five-years' hence way back then. Have you made it? Are you better off now than you were? Chances are, that unless you are in the very highest levels of management, you are barely scraping by. Sure, you've got an Audi, and a hi-def TV to watch Dancin' with the Stars, and surely your $250 a month cellphone bill is evidence that you're making progress, right?
This year, Americans now have a NEGATIVE savings rate. When it comes right down to it, that's the surest sign of the direction of an economy. How many of you pay off that credit card bill every month and put a little bit aside? Oh, and your retirement account at work doesn't count because that's going to disappear, Enron-style, long before you're able to use it.
No, you really should take a few hours out of your sodden, beaten-down lives and read Das Kapital. And you there. You, shaking your head with the know-it-all smirk. Read it sober.
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A little more context... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
For example: Duke Nukem Forever
Sorry ... too obvious, had to do it. :-)
I think you got that quote wrong... (Score:5, Funny)
"'You can improve productivity by 20%', Hoyle advised, 'by killing management consultants when you should: which is early in the lifecycle.'"
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Perfect PHB Logic. (Score:4, Funny)
kill development projects early, "and often," he said, "if your failure rate is high." You can improve productivity by 20%
By killing all of my projects, I'll have a failure rate of 100% but I'll do it 20% faster. Awesome!
Thanks, Gatner.
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Bits & pieces (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bits & pieces (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would you ever assemble wisdom and business savvy when it's simpler and easier to assemble random quotes & concepts from popular seminars and "Best Seller" managerial books.
You have to keep in mind, there's an industry which keeps inself employed by selling seminars and books. If everyone got all the right answers the first time, what would these people do?
Going out of business sale, nostrums 50% off!
While we're talking about random quotes (Score:5, Funny)
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History question (Score:3, Interesting)
What are some examples of them being right?
I worry about what gartner is telling my boss (Score:4, Insightful)
Please, someone tell Gartner Group to be a little less certain about their predictions. The mass of middle managers are afraid to do think anything that isn't supported by someone like Gartner.
Old ideas and old promises (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Old ideas and old promises (Score:5, Informative)
I sometimes get the idea that data modeling is one of least used methods for building information systems. I wonder why.
I absolutely agree. Data modeling is one of the most fundamental skills out there, but time and again I encounter apps with just an absolutely atrocious data model. Much more time needs to be devoted in school to the fundamentals of data modeling and the why behind data modeling best practices. Think about it -- in a "classic" MVC stack, the controller and GUI are often interchangeable, but if you're stuck with a poor way to persist data, the rest of the app *will* be quite limited no matter what you're using for business logic and / or presentation. Furthermore, none of these "component" vendors will help you . . . you'll just end up with a turd wrapped in Company X's duct tape.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep - data modeling is now out of vogue, and so it is mostly done by programmers.
Unfortunately, programmers are seldom good data modelers (if only because they seldom take the time to really learn the discipline). You can take a look at some of the very good books on data modeling patterns (I recommend the one by David Hays).
But there's no substitute for experience when you get into a tight spot - knowing when to break the old rules and use something like:
Your boss is just an object (Score:5, Funny)
Any of these business objects can be swapped out and replaced willy-nilly as you see fit. If the CEO has too much work on his hands, you can simply run a process scanner against his position-- the process scanner will highlight the areas for improvement. Then you hire a new person and assign some of the objects to him.
Heck? Want to replace the boss? Fire him and hire a new object to assume the responsibilities. The transition is seemless.
Don't forget that you paid some consultants $1 million for this study, and these are the conclusions.
---
Look-- looking at things as components is a useful exercise for modelling. It's an easier way to get a "big picture" perspective without getting mirred in the details.
But it will only get you so far, because DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS. Anbody who believes in such object-oriented drivel is certain to go out of business. Trouble is, the CEOs who promote this crap can jump from ship to ship-- not all of us can do that.
Re:Your boss is just an object (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously. Over the years I've worked in software, networks, and publishing, and I've never had the pleasure of working under any person for longer than about a year. Invariably when I've been hired, I've had the feeling that my new boss wasn't quite on top of things.
But on top of things or not, sure enough, within a couple of months of my being hired there's always an announcement that congratulations are in order because boss will be leaving us for much bigger and better things, or has been promoted to a new and more ridiculous level of abstraction within the organization. Then there's a party and some cake and silly goodbyes.
Then, the new guy comes in. He's always groomed, young-middle-age-ish, clearly an MBA or someone who's read a few too many business books and has been wearing a tie since he was four. He wrings his hands a lot and speaks in a worried-measured-reassuring tone and holds "orientation interviews" (or some variation thereon) with everyone during which he asks a lot of dumb, general, or both questions and says that he'll appreciate help in getting up to speed and he's really excited to have the opportunity to work with everyone.
Within the first two-three months, he'll fuck everything up, miss a pile of obligations or responsibilities, implement a whole slew of unworkable programs, misrepresent nearly everything we're doing in meetings with upper management, and then after a few months, just as everyone gets the feeling that he might finally be having to face the realities of the business, pull his head out of his ass, learn and scale back a little, and roll back some of the stupid changes he made, there will be an announcement... and a goodbye party...
And in will come a new guy, pick up all the old guy's stuff that wasn't quite working anyway, and soon there will be the meetings again... and the initiatives and changes again...
Wash, rinse, repeat as these jackasses earn six figures and get promoted up, up, and away in their beautiful balloons while the people at the bottom do the real work *in spite of* their idiotic tie-speak, with nary a reward year over year.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Complain as much as you'd like, but if your measure of success is place in the hierarchy and size of paycheck, then these guys are better at the game than you. You may not like it, but life's like that. It's kind of like complaining when you lose at a game of poker because your style of play calls for putting your cards face-up on the table.
While it'd be nice if promotion and salary were neatly tied to ability and achievements, that ain't the case. Sticking your head in the sand and prete
Re:Your boss is just an object (Score:4, Insightful)
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I do 'middleware', and I also do 'supercomputers' (Score:5, Interesting)
Asking "Why would you ever code an app from scratch again? Why would you need to?" is like asking "Why would you ever want to have a baby".
Sometimes it's the only way to develop what you need; sometimes it just happens by accident; and sometimes someone gives you one to look after for them.
You don't want to have a baby very often, but it's just as well that some people have them sometimes.
We're thinking about throwing Java out. It has the same problems with 'synchronisation' that C has with 'memory allocation'. You can't get it right all the time, it's too hard.
And Intel are coming up with these 80-Core chips.
A real lot of stuff will have to be rebuilt if we do. Hopefully automatically built from modelling tools. But there will have to be people, to resolve the defects, if it is to support the business.
Re:I do 'middleware', and I also do 'supercomputer (Score:3)
Just curious: What are the proposed alternatives that simplify synchronization?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
(1) Software Transactional Memory, STMs. You write "int STM x=5;" and then one thread can do "atomic {x+=1;}" and another does "atomic {...;x-=1;...}" and the runtime+compiler magically make the atomic blocks execute atomically. This is different from Java synchronization blocks because these can be executed optimistically in parallel and because they never result in deadlock. People therefore say that STMs are "compositional" in a way that lo
What's old is new (Score:3, Interesting)
New software to solve new problems (Score:3, Insightful)
How about because what's needed doesn't exist? This bozo sounds like the head of the patent office in 19th century who recommended that the office be closed because, "...everything that can be invented, has been invented." What an idiot.
As the cost of computing drops, there will always be new problems that could not be economically attacked until the cost of the computation became cheap enough.
Re:I do 'middleware', and I also do 'supercomputer (Score:3, Funny)
The 80x86?
More gardner crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Assuming they mean business logic and not things like sorting algorithms, you had better have vast quantities of foresight to make that happen. As most other crud conjured up by these people, it sounds great on paper and when given to executive types in the form of powerpoint presentations, but in practice, it falls apart. Different programmers, different programming styles, changing business rules, mergers, new client requirements, scope creep, abandoned products, legacy code you're unable to get away from, new business standards (like we're a java company, no
And the catch is always... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Yeah, sure, that should work. A little overkill, but it'll do what we need."
"Oh and it has to track the inventory by supplier's parent company and supplier's parent company's SKU."
"Uh....what?"
"Yeah, we get most of our inventory from local suppliers, but they all get it from the OEM. We need to use the OEM part numbers, with an indication of which OEM it is."
"Uh, but the MegaMess project tracked inventory by product group. It doesn't even use SKUs. And we don't need to report on SKUs for what we're doing, why do we need them?"
"Director of marketing wants to see a report broken down by SKU, and rolled up by parent supplier."
"I don't think we're going to be able to use the MegaMess inventory."
"DAMMIT! Just use the components we've already got! We aren't going to write any new code for this!"
The problem with the component approach (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you're still left with the remaining hard work, which probably got harder and will take longer due to the overhead of your component framework and its mess of configuration.
And that is totally ignoring the fact that it's very hard to find components to reuse anyway.
Modularity has downsides (Score:4, Insightful)
Answer: In order to avoid bloat, stability, performance, and security issues from using modules that are overly-used, overly-general and/or don't exactly meet your spec but are "close enough."
Best Example: Microsoft Office
Ya done it (Score:3, Funny)
You just blew out my buzzword detector. Expect a repair bill soon, Jackson!
NIH. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are some things you shouldn't do yourself, and some things you should.
Janitorial staffing, for example. Should each department in a building owned by the same company hire a seperate company to clean their offices? Obviously not. But should they all be required to use the same text editor, no matter if they are laying out advertisments or writing C++? I think not.
Both of those cases are obvious, but what about the text editor used by programmers in different departments? Unfortunetly, usually the person in a position to make company-wide policy does not know enough about a specific job area to make reasonable blanket requirements, requiring all developers to use a particular editor, no matter if they are developing for Windows or Linux would be like telling all janitors to use the same floor cleaner for office carpets and the parking garage.
In the Janitors case, since they are often outsourced, or at least a seperate department, they have their own structure which tells them what to use where.
In the software developers case, having a seperate structure to set standards can lead to problems when the Project manager's directions conflict with the standard practices; the project manager's desires usually take hold, because they are in direct contact with the developer, while the company standards are less strictly enforced. This leads to the effective death of the 'standards'. After this happens a number of times, everyone loses faith in anything labeled a company standard, and since they expect no support, they don't even really try to adhere to them.
I don't have a solution, as once an organization reaches this level of NIH, any efforts to re-establish a standards process are doomed to fail.
This an old model (Score:3, Insightful)
The component model works reasonably well for the Generic Core Business Functions (i.e accounting, human resources, sales, etc.), however only to the exent that you can use Off The Shelf Functionality. If your requirements are unique (or you think they are) you end up with a full blown development project on your hands anyway (with associated headaches and expense).
If, on the other hand, the requirements you are trying to address are part of the Value-Added Function that your organization provides to it's customers, you had better be willing to invest in creating some real value for the customer. If you spend a couple of months integrating off the shelf components that can provide the same value, you're not likely to be in business long.
Killing projects early for the Right Reasons is simply good management but the need to do this is usually an indication that there is something wrong in the organization itself. If you are part of an organization that does this frequently, the governance process or the development process is broken or both. Flee with all due speed.
Feeling threatened? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'll just sit and let those companies who think mixing and matching "components" is going to work, loudly go out of business. If I happen to be one of the casualties in that fallout, so much the better. It's not what I sig
Re-use when possible, re-code when sensible (Score:3, Insightful)
For programmers its simple to put into words - if you have programmed a function to resample colour images and now you need a function to resample black and white images, just use the colour image function.
As for managers - if you discover you have three projects to manage the time shedule of section A, section B and section C - tell one of the teams to make the software generic enough to manage all kinds of time shedules (including those of sections A, B, C) and reassign the other two teams.
But if, in the above image resampling example your function needs about twenty times as much time as a function specialized for B&W imaged would need and is used constantly, you should code a specialized function, if performance would take a too large hit.
Version Lock (Score:5, Insightful)
We've been trying to maintain a product developed in-house over the last decade or so. Wouldn't it make sense to buy a GUI toolkit, they thought, so we can concentrate on our core competency? Sure, except we had to stay on Solaris 8 when everybody else was using Solaris 9, and then 10. The company that provided the toolkit got sold a couple of times, and is now part of some consulting outfit you've never heard of. They have two guys in Bombay trying to port it to newer platform versions, but they don't really test it, so we've had to take on that additional burden. Without the source code. Sometimes they're busy working on other stuff, so they don't get to our complaints for weeks. We're terrified they'll go out of business before we're able to do a rewrite.
Of course, Oracle stopped concentrating on the Solaris 8 drivers, so when we called for support all we ever heard was "upgrade to Solaris x and install the newest version". Would that solve the problem? Who knows? We can't do it anyway because of the GUI toolkit.
Now we want to move that product to Linux, but the GUI tool in question doesn't work on Linux at all. They're trying to get it working on RHEL 3, while we've just moved our other tools to RHEL 4.
You wan't to make a brittle tool and take the blame when the enterprise can't upgrade the desktop OS because a key component vendor just went out of business? By all means, knock yourself out. You can commiserate with one of our groups that's still running Java 1.1 because a piece they bought from a now-bankrupt vendor won't run on a later version. The more third party vendors you have, the worse it gets, too. You can get circular dependencies that prevent you from upgrading anything without a total rewrite.
Me? I'm not writing everything myself, but I use OSS whenever I can. After the number of times we've been burned in recent years, if you work for my company you'd better have a damn good reason to bring in third-party vendors. We're pretty much down to Java and Oracle as the only easy sells for new projects.
Crank up the organ, monkeys... (Score:3, Interesting)
Very old story... (Score:4, Insightful)
This appeals to managers, since having programmers around is a pain. They're expensive, unreliable and act weird.
It will of course never work in reality. Anything interesting enough to be worth doing will be hard enough to get right that you need an actual programmer for it. And programmers have been putting components together almost since the dawn of programming, it's just that some people don't know that.
Here we go again. (Score:4, Insightful)
Buhahahahhahahhahhahhahaahahahah!!!!! HERE THEY GO AGAIN!!!!!
I'm writing software for 15 years. And I already lost count of how many times I was told that crap and that "tomorrow" I would be among unemployed, since even idiots would be able to create software using tomorrow's modular platforms. That tomorrow is yet to realize.
I was working with asm/pascal 15 years ago - and were basically rewriting applications from scratch: for new platforms and for new performance requirements.
I now work with C/C++ - and basically rewrite applications from scratch: for new platforms and for new performance requirements.
What'd changed? NOTHING.
Would the idiots ever learn? As computer industry develops and grows - so do requirements for computers. 15 years ago nobody expected to have affordable real-time 3D graphics or on-line simulation algorithms or real-time video encoding. Now we take that for granted. As old fart, of course, I cannot even imagine what would be capable computers in next 15 years - but all that would be possible because of abundance of cheap HW performance and I hope more intelligent software. Not because we would have such performance - but because I'm sure there is and would be ever growing demand for it.
e.g. some AI guys might tomorrow implement autonomous OS which would be voice/etc controlled. So you would be able to plug your photo camera into computer, say "Grab all new photos" and (miracle!) it would do that. Then say "If there are more than N gigs of new photos burn me them on disk as photo album.". Etc. Voice recognition + intelligent interpretation of commands + AI personalization - are tasks not yet possible for computers both hardware-wise and software-wise. NOW. How well fit modern algorithms and applications for tasks in such environment? They are completely unfit. So when development would come to that point - we software developers would have to rewrite all the components and blocks to fit well into new platform/OS/etc to get most out of it. IOW, do not put your GCC aside just yet.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've re-written the same applications dozens of times, sometimes because my code is unreadable, sometimes just for fun to find a new way to do it, and occasionally because it's so easy that it's actually faster than spending 2 minutes finding the previous version. Gotta keep my mind fresh, I'm over 30 you know.
Though.. I suppose if I could call my Perl application portfolio manager and ask them where that 10 line text parser is that I wrote yesterday, and they could provide it r
Re:Gawds... (Score:4, Insightful)
What gartner has in mind is telling the manager what they already believe. Several year ago it was so fashion to rewrite an application from scratch. As a manager, saying that you were reusing something made you look so old school, not a true dot-com mentality. Nowadays you must sacrifice a chicken to get some hope of having the budget to look at the code.
Look at the buzzword friendly tech in the development world, like SOA and Co, this is all about flow management, gluing application together,
I don't know what gartner is for. Basically whatever is the tendency of the day, they just acknowledge that the right way to go.
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Re:Of course that's what Gartner is saying . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:its in the glue or its in the code (Score:5, Informative)
Gartner is just trying to justify offshoring and make $$ by telling MBAs what they already believe.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The best solutions to specific problems are going to be custom made, at least for a while.
Yeah, but sometimes you have to gird yourself for those days when the sheep come home from being fleeced at the latest management fad sheering.
I vividly remember the epic battles that took place when managers returned from TQM (Total Quality Management) training. The all had these purposeful looks of the new acolyte and a Franklin Planner under their arm. They cooked up Vision and Mission statements and tried to
Re:Scope creep? (Score:4, Informative)
Scope can be reflected in requirements. If the number of requirements goes up 1% per month, you are getting a 1% scope creep. Note that this measure does not take into account differences in complexity between individual requirements - for a more accurate measure one might use function points, number of classes and/or methods needed to implement the functionality, etc. You need a fairly mature process to be able to measure these at all, let alone accurately, but they are available to those who work hard at the process game (now whether or not that actually gets you anywhere is open to debate, but...).
However, the quote of a 1% per month scope creep as a cut off point seems a bit low, especially if taken literally on a month-to-month basis. Across the life of a project, 1% per month may be high, but cutting a project off because its scope has risen 7% in three months of the late analysis or design phases seems a bit excessive, especially if by doing so you have 0% increase during implementation, test, or deployment.
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