Reliable Systems

Many if not most software project leaders came up through the development ranks.  It’s generally thought of as a distinct advantage – you know the technologies you’re using, you can form your own well reasoned opinions about how hard something is, what is possible, and how long it should take.  For a long time, I felt that the best way to get results from development teams was to use my experience and knowledge to be very understanding of the challenges they faced and give them whatever time they asked for.  However, in the last few years I’ve run into several situations where I just couldn’t get them the extra time or relief from the most problematic requirements.  I predicted doom to the projects in question but instead I observed some of the best outcomes I’d ever experienced.

While the projects were successful, it bothered me that the secret sauce seemed to be a rigid adherence to schedule and delivery more than any other consideration.  This was exactly the reverse of how I wanted projects to succeed:  I wanted them to succeed because I was treating the developers how they always wanted to be, not like a stereotype from Office Space.  How could it be that better results came from ignorance of the technical details involved?

Developers Will Use All Available Time

Upon reflection, the first thing that struck me was how much an immobile deadline focused discussions and decision making. If you give a team more time, they will expand their process to consume it.  Time will get consumed by:

• Elaborate Decision Making: When you have little time, you make a choice and go with it until it appears it just can’t work.  When you have a lot of time, you sit back and look for the very best option.  That then requires defining what the best is – is it fastest, or smallest, or most scalable, or whatever.
• Development Approach: Under pressure you’ll tend to go with the proven guaranteed approach.  If you have the luxury of time you’re more likely to engage in yak shaving like investigating a new tool or approach, or writing several prototypes first before you develop the real solution.  You might even just throw caution to the wind by skipping a formal design figuring you’ll have the time to just code and test your way to a solution.

The more time a development team has, the harder it is to argue against spending it on up front luxuries.  It also can be harder to argue for long term best practices because the team has the time now to develop a solution any way they want.

Unknowns Create Boomerang Estimates

Even very experienced developers are generally terrible at estimating the duration of developing a solution.  This has been demonstrated over and over by many other parties.  The key behavior that we’ve observed is the phenomenon that from when you approach a specific development problem (like displaying a graph on a web page) until you know exactly how you’re going to solve it (and have a reason for confidence in that approach) you will tend to estimate high because in effect the only reasonable estimate is infinity.

Put another way, as long as you don’t know how you will solve a problem you don’t know for sure that it is solvable which means it will take an infinite amount of time to solve it.  Fortunately, developers are almost universally optimists so they believe they can solve anything eventually – so they’ll pull out a standard answer like three weeks or months or whatever feels like a big chunk of time to figure out the problem but not so big that it kills the project.   The reality is that until you know how you’re going to solve it, it feels like it could take forever.

Once a solution has presented itself  the development team will often find that all it will take is some cleanup and polish to be done- a very small amount of time.  What will push the team to find the answer?  We’re back to the problem of elaborate decision making when you have the luxury of time.  Finding solutions tends to not be a linear problem that will be solved with incremental development energy.  Instead, it tends to be solved by getting people together and brainstorming possible solutions until you find a few candidates and can work out what it’ll take to prove them out.  Under pressure, people tend to focus their creative energy and be more willing to compromise.   That flexibility will tend to get rid of pet requirements and developer gold-plating and focus on the most critical aspects of the problem.

What’s the alternate approach?

The key is to not let your knowledge and experience as a developer lead you to buy into the stories the team creates around what’s reasonable to get done and how long it will take.  Instead, you have to stick with the project’s goals first then the facts of the project.  The project’s goals form the objective reality of what has to be accomplished for the project to survive:  Deliver this functionality by that date, keep these people informed, solve these problems without causing those problems.

When the team runs into a wall and needs more time, instead of buying into the story of needing a lot of time, set a specific and tight goal that keeps a solid amount of time pressure on the team to solve the issue and prevent the problems above from showing up.  Ideally, find a way to give out one or two day chunks to answer incremental questions if necessary to emphasize that time is precious and has to be invested carefully.  This is where you can leverage your experience in a way that a non-developer can’t:  The team knows they can’t snow you with tech details, and you can define a specific, measurable result that can be achieved in a short period of time that they can’t argue with.  Despite this, you are bound to have to assert a few times that the time limit is the limit – solve the problem in that time.  It’s very hard because you’ve been on the other side of that conversation and it can feel like you’re the Pointy Haired Boss, but it’s fundamentally your job on the project.

What will nearly always happen is the team will surprise itself – a solution will be presented within the team that they can live with and can be done in the time they have.  It may be incomplete or have some risky shortcomings, and you’ll want to ask how long it’d take to address those.  You probably shouldn’t address them in the first round, but the team will feel better that you’ve considered through things and will buy into the outcome more if you ask.  You’ll also want to make a record of it so that the team can in the future recognize what was a predicted shortcoming vs. an accidental defect.

Do you want it solved right?

This is a question that often gets voiced within a team as a rebuttal to external time pressures and is very dangerous.  The challenge is that most non-technical people don’t get the number of ways that a problem can be solved: instead, each problem appears to have a single solution.  Take away your technical knowledge and imagine you’re the paying customer:  What’s the alternative – were you going to solve it wrong? If that’s the case, what else have you done that’s garbage?  If you took your car to a repair person and they said it’d be $500 to fix it, then when you came back they said well, if you want it fixed right it’ll actually be $1200, wouldn’t you wonder what the hell the $500 fix was?

Usually this statement is uttered in desperation when a team believes they just need more time to figure out a problem.  Nobody wants a problem solved wrong.  Skip the hyperbole and get down to action:  break down the problem into small chunks of time that can be invested for a specific measurable result, and make sure the team gets that overage time is the most precious commodity.

Side Note: This is an advantage of SCRUM in practice.  If you’re following an Agile Development practice, particularly SCRUM, this fits right in:  Focus on making each sprint deliver the user stories it was supposed to even if you have to leave some special cases for a later sprint.  The daily stand up meetings are a great place for the different team members to apply team pressure against over engineering and doomsday estimates.

Cleaning Up and Closing Out

At some point you need to close out your release and ship it. For each of the areas where you’ve had to make compromises and taken shortcuts you have to choose to either:

• Ship as Final: Decide the implementation is close enough to the intent of the end-user functional requirements that it can be the final implementation (at least until new information contradicts this decision)
• Ship as Temporary: Decide that something is better than nothing and ship the feature with limitations.
• Cut the Feature: Hold back the feature until it can be reconsidered or reimplemented.

You’re nearly always better off shipping the feature, often as a final feature pending more information because it’s very hard to gauge the true impact of each limitation.  This is particularly true of user-facing features and environments where it’s possible to evolve the software rapidly.  Inevitably once it’s in the hands of your users you’ll discover aspects of it that you didn’t think of that will require rework and you may discover that the killer feature you were sure would be the hit of the release is hardly used.  In either of these cases if you’ve invested a great deal of time in making it foolproof the team will tend to resist changing it.  It’s a natural product of the presumed relationship between effort and value.  If necessary, you might put in some temporary safeties to detect and catch the limitations you’re worried about.

The major exceptions to this approach are areas that are too dangerous to deploy if less than fully trustworthy.  For example, if your team is developing a data storage system, software deployment system, or other critical infrastructure your choices likely resolve down to making it as right as possible or holding the feature until it can be reworked.

If it turns out that the solutions that are viable within the schedule have significant limitations, you should make sure these caveats are known to the business – provided you can express them in business terms.  For example, knowing that an algorithm won’t work if your userbase doubles is probably not a significant caveat, unless you know the business plans to double in a relatively short period of time.  Every system has limits, and every software change has risks.  Business representatives don’t like to hear the same items covering the same ground repeated every time you discuss software, and it tends to make them not hear the new and important information as well as sound like you’re attempting to transfer accountability from your team to them.

When a new hire starts with your company, what are you doing to set them up with technology to work with your organization?  You probably focus on making sure you set up their account, clean up a computer for them, and possibly set up a corporate cell phone or Blackberry.  You might also do some quick training with them so they can log in to their computer, get email, and access the Internet.  This is all pretty obvious and fits within normal tickets your IT organization handles every day.

Now step back for a minute and look at it from the employee’s perspective.  When someone needs access to IT resources within your company, there are really three interests you have:

1. Access: People need equipment, software, accounts, and access to IT support.  This is the basic block & tackling that you are handling now.
2. Effective: The tools you provide need to deliver on the business needs the user has.  Whatever’s in the way of that – defective equipment, user training, or suitability to task needs to be addressed.  The best computer with the right software in the hands of a user that doesn’t know how to use them is worthless.
3. Security: Access to your network means access to all of the data and work products within it.  You need people to understand how you approach security, what they are and aren’t allowed to do, and how you’re going to work with them to maintain security.

Setting the Stage

Employees often develop a personal and possessive feeling about the equipment provided to them by a company.  They think of it has their computer, just like they have a computer at home.  This creates a range of problems for your organization by extension:  If it’s their computer then when there’s a problem they’ll want their computer fixed, not a different computer that’s suitable.   They’ll come to regard problems personally, not objectively.

Instead, you want users to look at the equipment they’re provided to do their jobs as just that – tools that enable them to be more effective.  Stepping back into the big picture, a computer isn’t any different than a wrench or a filing cabinet.  It isn’t their computer or phone, it’s the company’s – designed to make them effective at producing whatever the company needs.   When your user community gets this, they’ll self censor their support requirements:  Watching a DVD movie on the company laptop won’t feel support-worthy.

The best time to establish this is to set the right expectations up front:  Have this conversation before the user gets their network account.  The goal is to make sure they understand that:

• You’re committed to their success.  You’re passionate about making sure they’re effective.  You have a support system designed to make sure that their issues get resolved quickly, and you have provisions for support off hours and when they’re on the road.  If they aren’t sure if you can or should help with an item, you want them to engage you anyway – You’ll let them know.
• The technology is there to make them effective at their job. Your job (IT) is to make sure that they are as effective as possible at that.
• They are responsible for their effectiveness. If they need something – training, repair, whatever – it’s their responsibility to get it, and they can get it.
• They are responsible for their user account. Anything anyone does with that account is their responsibility.   That means if someone figures out their password, or they leave their computer unlocked, or otherwise treat their user account with less than the respect it deserves then they are going to be held responsible by the company for that.

Support Your Local Sheriff!

It’s painful to hear on Monday that a user was trying to get something important done and couldn’t due to a simple issue you could have resolved.  Perhaps they knew they could have contacted you for support – but didn’t for whatever reason.  What users will remember is that they had a problem, and it kept them from getting things done.  All of the work you do to support users – special on call staff, phone numbers, email contact, whatever – didn’t work because they never got called upon.

To address this, you want to address as many of the human factors that keep people from calling on support as you can.

1. Make sure you’re always available: The cost of setting up a toll-free number for users to contact support is trivial.  If you don’t already have an on-call rotation, set one up and make sure there’s someone to answer that toll-free number at all times.  The same person can answer an email address designed for support.
2. Make sure they know all the ways: In the past, we’ve published business cards with the 800# for support and email address, and we put these cards everywhere:  In laptop bags, in a card holder at the front desk, anywhere that we could think of so that there’d be one around when a user needed to know how to contact support.
3. Talk to users about it: Be cheery.  Make sure they know that you personally are driven to make sure they’re successful, and you look at it as an honor to help them out after hours.  They need to really get that you want that phone call, because you need to conquer the very human desire not to bother or inconvenience other people.

We really recommend making up a business card that has all of the key information a user needs – the contact information for support, company fax number and main phone number, remote dial in for voice mail, common URLs for external access to email and other services, pretty much anything they need to know on the road.  I’m sure you have it all committed to memory, but if you’re an employee that doesn’t travel every day you probably don’t.  Little steps like this can dramatically affect the general user population’s opinion about IT.

Security Begins at Home

You want to make sure that each user gets how seriously your organization takes security.   People often don’t treat their user account with the same respect they’d treat a physical key or card.  Most users wouldn’t give a stranger the keys to their office or building but would give their password out over the phone to someone who claimed they need it.

People worry a lot about security threats from the Internet, but most break-ins – overwhelmingly – happen from inside.  Most of these are done either through social engineering (where the intruder convinces someone to give them access) or by a disgruntled employee.

To address these common threats, you need to address the key social aspects of security.  In addition to normal sensible security practices,  we recommend establishing a few policies:

1. IT Personnel NEVER ask for passwords: Make it clear to your IT Support organization and every user that no one in IT will ever ask them for their user ID or password.  Therefore, if anyone calls you asking for that information you know one thing – they aren’t authorized to it.  If they give their password to IT, or IT hears that they gave it to someone else, their password will be reset.
2. No one will use their account but them: If IT needs to do something logged in as you, they’ll do it in your presence – after all, you are still accountable for what happens with your account.

The second one may cause some heartburn with your desktop support staff- they’re probably used to solving a range of user problems by accessing the computer as the user, and anything that’ll get in the way of that is a problem.  While it may cause some inconvenience – you aren’t going to be able to do work that requires logging in as the user if they aren’t around – the message this sends to your users about how serious you are about security is essential.  You need to be cleaner about the rules than they are.

What about Non-Employees?

What should you do with contractors or others that need access to your network, even temporarily?  If they are getting a user account, they should go through the same procedure.  You have the same goals:  You want them to be effective and not compromise your environment.

Finally, Ditch the Input Devices

Most computers come with mice and keyboards that are dirt cheap.  If this is what you’re using and you’re recycling a computer, please – get a new mouse and keyboard.  Most computer companies do the same thing when they process returns.  The fact is that keyboards get filthy quickly, and while I may not mind the crumbs from my pop tarts, it certainly isn’t going to create the right impression if I get one that’s full of someone else’s.  You should be able to score new ones for your HP, Dell, or whatever for not more than $40 and really – with what employees cost in salary and other expenses, don’t you want them to know you care?

Have a story about how you support your new users?  Share it in the comments below or drop us a line to tell us about it.

We spend most of our time deeply engaged in our client’s projects.  We work hard to assimilate quickly in to our client’s culture and challenges to make sure we can deliver the most value we can.  This doesn’t leave us with a lot of opportunities to do team building within our own company.  We’re committed that employees of eSymmetrix feel a part of something a lot more than just our clients – they are part of the eSymmetrix way of getting things done, which they can be proud of.

In the past several months the three partners of our firm have been scattered to handle all of the challenges of our growing business, but with the completion of a major engagement with a client we had the opportunity to spend some time back together to focus on more long range concerns.  We had intended to spend the time working on product and marketing strategy for our upcoming commercial release of Gibraltar, but instead on a whim decided to do something we called the Code Monkey Challenge.

The goal was to make something complete and useful within a very short period of time.  Complete for us meant we were going to create a software component, test it, package it, and publish it to a new web site with descriptive content all in 48 hours.  We didn’t even have a hosting company set up beforehand.  To be useful it had to be usable by people outside of our company as delivered, and fulfill a real need, at least for a set of users.

We started at 9:00 AM with the goal of publishing the final version to a new web site by 6:00 PM the following day.  Our initial approach was to have one hour sprints of work divided between each team member, then meet and review and set up the next sprint.  In the end we used three hour sprints, delivering to each other through our source code system at the end of each sprint.  We made our goal – you can see the results at www.gibraltarsoftware.com.  Most importantly, we achieved our result of bringing together our team members.

Update:  The small Logger we wrote as part of the Code Monkey Challenge has since been rewritten and incorporated into the Gibraltar Agent.

We eliminated any distraction we could so that we could apply as much of the 48 hours as possible to the project.  We worked well into the evenings and had others provide some support to make sure we had food, coffee, and no outside distractions.

The intense time pressure gave us a good tool to eliminate most conflict: there simply wasn’t time for much philosophy on how to approach the different technical aspects.  The lack of time removed ambiguity that otherwise would be the source of conflict.  There wasn’t much time for yak shaving either – we had to produce results at the end of each sprint.  Still the first few sprints were spent mostly in exploration and validation of the approaches with our first rough cut of each element done by the end of the first day.  The second day was then about refining and documenting.

While we did skip over some aspects that we would normally do on a larger scale project, we did include most elements of our preferred development process.  We did coordinated sprints of the team separated by an after action review to adjust our plan.  We distributed code and results between the team through our source code control system, we wrote automated unit tests to verify key aspects of the system, and did peer design reviews.  If anything, the lack of time made us less likely to bypass most parts of the process because we knew we wouldn’t have time to dig our way out of any problems we created.

The real goal of the exercise was to bring us back together as a leadership team and establish more of the shared experiences that define interpersonal relationships.  It’s helpful to bridge the gaps that easily develop between architects and developers, developers and designers, engineering and marketing.  We all had to come together to achieve our result because it was clear that we’d all fail if we couldn’t.  Most business projects are sufficiently fuzzy that it isn’t nearly as clear what the cost of not working together is, and politics can overwhelm cooperation.  It’s an experience I’d recommend in any software team, particularly if you’re in a company that can mix skills and responsibilities.

The next time your shop is done with a project, or when you need a break consider doing your own Code Monkey Challenge.  It only takes two days.  Here’s the rules:

• Produce a Real Product: Scope out a product that is really useful to a specific audience.  Sure, you’re giving it away for free, but it still needs to stand up to scrutiny.
• Marketing Material Too: What good is a product if no one knows about it or understand how or why to use it?  Even though you’re giving it away you want people to be able to understand and take advantage of your effort.
• Help and Usage Information: Like a real product, it has to be usable without you sitting over the customer’s shoulders.  Depending on what it is, you need to tell them how to install it, program with it, and provide guidance on recommended usage scenarios.
• In Little Time: Extra time is the enemy – it will reduce the pressure to work together and encourage unnecessary bells and whistles while removing the catalyst that gets everyone to work together.
• Publish to the World: If you’re  a large company, perhaps it’s just the company.  Wherever it is, it has to feel like real stakes to the team:  Your results will be on display.

To set it up, be sure that you can eliminate anything that would distract the team – they can work into the evenings, have food brought in, whatever.  The closer it is to a total immersion experience the better.  It improves the sense of camerarderie developed within the team and ensures the most creative energy is directed to the project. 

If you try it out, or have another software team building story, please drop me a line and tell me how it went, or leave a comment below.

In the past two years I’ve heard the term Technology Debt thrown around to justify a number of technology decisions.  In an effort to come up with a term that would bridge the business-technology gap, someone came up with Technology Debt to indicate that you were basically creating a future liability that would have to be paid back - rewriting a section of code or switching out a module, whatever.  Since business folks deal with assets and liabilities routinely, expressing subtle technology problems in financial terms has a lot of appeal.  The basic concept is most frequently used in relationship to software: Let’s say you defer something to a future release so you can get the release out the door.  Perhaps the feature will only work for very few customers but you don’t have time to generalize it, or the solution won’t scale as new users are added.

This is fine as far as it goes, but like any metaphor while it may be a way of explaining some aspects where two things are in common it’s very easy to overextend because in fact it isn’t a true financial liability.

Take a hypothetical example: You are supposed to add federated identity to your web application. What you want to do is create an identity broker that will allow your SaaS application to connect with Microsoft’s ADFS, OpenID, and a few variations of SAML. You believe this will get you the market reach you need, and by creating your own identity broker you can decouple your application from changes in this still evolving space, as well as support your own native security technique.

As you dig into it, you realize that this just isn’t feasible in the time you have: You need to get a solution done in two months to meet a commitment to a customer, and it turns out this customer just uses ADFS. It just so happens that your web framework can easily work with ADFS directly, so to save the schedule you drop back and just do ADFS. From a development standpoint this is a hack – you are doing something quickly you can’t extend to meet the original requirement and you’re pretty sure that you’ll need to undo this later and do it right, which will cost more than just doing it right the first time. This is Technology Debt.

Metaphors have Limited Application

The metaphor doesn’t hold for long.  First, unlike real debt there is no external requirement to pay this back.  Perhaps you never will need to support more than ADFS, or that after all of the talk customers just won’t adopt federated identity.  At the start of each release cycle, you can look at the competitive market and see what is the correct, most important work to be done.  It might be that you’ll have to make good on something you deferred, but you might not.  If you didn’t, it never was debt.  How confident are you that you can tell the difference right now?

Second, all technology has future liability. The more code you write, the more you have to maintain and support. That has a cost as well for the future. Depending on the nature of your product it could mean that you have to support questionable past API decisions or obscure and intricate features of your product. Every feature has a cost to maintain, every line of code you use or reference in a third party library has weight. Only talking about deferred development as technology debt implies that what you have right now is all asset, but it isn’t.

Rampant Misuse

The biggest challenge I’ve seen is that the metaphor is used to push development team goals on the business without having to adequately justify them.  By handing business folks something they can easily relate to, it’s easy to gloss over the underlying technical implications.

For example, say you have an application that’s currently written in Visual Basic 6.  You can justly claim that Microsoft has dropped support for it and that the day is coming when it will no longer run on the latest operating system (Microsoft has committed that it will run on Vista and Windows Server 2008, but that will likely be the end). This sounds very alarming indeed!  Naturally, the answer is to rewrite the entire application in .NET 3.5. Yes, this will take longer and cost a lot more than just adding the features you need to the existing code, but it eliminates all of the technology debt represented by that old nasty VB6 code.

Now look at it a little more objectively. Yes, you will need to eliminate that VB6 code at some point – notably when you are upgrading from Vista to whatever’s next.  When will that be?  Well, if you believe the hype that people love Windows XP and may just consider Vista in the future, you have some calendar time. As long as it’s done by then, Microsoft dropping support isn’t a real issue.  We’ve yet to work with a client who’s VB6 application didn’t work just fine on Vista, thank you very much.

Second, with rare exception every modern technology has a half-life. The notable exceptions are COBOL, C, and C++.  You can with confidence know that these languages are still going to be in active use in 15 years and that code you create now will work with minor to modest adjustment on current platforms at that time.  I would dispute if a similar claim can be made for the latest crop of languages.  A major reason for this is that modern languages are really whole environments – a programming language and an API/runtime.  While it may be theoretically possible to write a C# compiler without toting along the .NET runtime, it isn’t going to happen.  Likewise for PHP, RoR, and even Java.  Java’s framework is much more shallow which ironically will likely give it more life because it can adapt to radical changes in computing environments and there is already an intent to decouple most of the code from specific frameworks.

This means that today’s latest and greatest environment will be tomorrows VB6.  Just listen to people that jumped on .NET 1.1 discuss how they’re going to upgrade to .NET 2.0 or later, and that’s really not a particularly dramatic move.

Fundamentally, when you purchase software you’re making a bet in the vendor and community behind it. This is one place where the LAMP stack has a number of advantages because of the openness of the environment and the institutionalized tolerance of actively supporting releases for a long time. This is fundamentally enabled by their open source nature, but even if you had the source code for a commercial product it’s not likely you could do much with it; unless it’s fairly simple the burden of maintenance is likely higher than the cost of replacing it. Counteracting this are a lot of hidden costs to open source that may be difficult for a small team to absorb.

Easy Metaphors Seldom Produce Great Outcomes

Next time you’re trying to bridge the gap from technology to business, try to stay away from simple metaphors like Technology Debt. Instead, have real conversations to articulate the potential business impacts of the technical decisions and then hear from the business what they are concerned about. With a real dialog, everyone is in on why you deferred work to later and what bet is being made, and no one will be surprised when you do show up in a year to start porting that VB6 app to .NET.

If you spent several hours some afternoon researching on the web what technology is the best for your next project, you’d probably come to the following conclusions:  Linux is the best, or perhaps the Macintosh…  Of course everything can be written in PHP or Ruby on Rails.  If you’re feeling very stuffy, you might be old fashioned and use Java or .NET, Windows or any flavor of Unix that isn’t Linux.  For your database you should just store everything as XML files, but if you feel compelled to have a database use MySQL.  But if you’re still a slave to the 1990’s then you might decide to keep using the corporate dinosaur- Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server.  In the end, the only constant is that whatever you’ve used in the past is certainly out of fashion and certainly a slow, archaic approach to solving problems.

Nearly all teams work within a relatively closed ecosystem – the technologies and people represent only a minor subset of all technologies available today.  Even within these small groups the number of choices at every level are daunting.  Even if you’ve selected your OS, language, framework, and database – what architecture model are you going to use?  What is your data access and caching strategy?  At each turn you’ll want to pick the best option but have a flood of choices to select from.  Many people can tell you about how they led a project that used any particular technology and it worked like a champ with no drawbacks.  On the surface it makes it possible to defend just about any new technology as the way to get your next project done.

What is very hard to find is a real comparative analysis that highlights in comparable situations the results with different technologies.  It’s not a surprise this is so – such analysis is very expensive and time consuming, and few companies would try to solve the same exact problem using competing technologies because it’s not the business they’re in.

Where does this leave you?  What technology should you use on the next project?  Most likely, you’ll have the best success with an incremental improvement on the technologies you already have in your toolkit.  Why?

Infinite Solutions in Infinite Diversity

Most conversations in technology on the web are exclusive - they advocate X over Y or Y over X.  The truth is much more that X or Y can both solve the problem but do it in different ways and with different levels of effort for a team starting from scratch.  What’s much more useful is to ask why you can’t solve the problem effectively with the tools and technologies that are a natural fit for your environment.  Even if a new technology may be the easiest way to solve the specific problem you’re looking at it may not be the best choice when you consider everything that goes into creating the entire software system and maintaining it over time.

When confronted with a strong advocate for a technology shift, keep the conversation focused on the benefits of shifting away from the natural or familiar selections for your organization.

New Methods are Expensive

When you introduce new technologies or tools there is always a short term hit.  Most respected research indicates that even technologies and tools that have a substantial improvement in effectiveness are at best neutral on the first project that uses them.  The most successful technologies and tools are ones that are evolutions of things your team already knows.  The more divergent it is from that, the more time it will take to get over the learning curve, establish best practices, and generally become effective.

Known Problems vs. Unknown Problems

A common challenge when comparing a new technology against existing methods is not recognizing that while you know of all of the problems with your existing technologies, you don’t know of the problems with the new ones.  This can lead to a comparison that shows a number of critical problems with the current technology, and none on the new technology.  It isn’t that there aren’t problems with the new technology, it’s that you don’t know what they are yet. Whenever you put in a new technology, no matter how promising it is, it is going to have new, unexpected problems.

What’s worse is that your organization most likely has workarounds for every problem you’ve encountered, so they don’t really have the impact of a new problem.  Your development team may not know about them, but talk to the operations staff, support staff, and your users before you assume that a technology problem that worries you really is at the top of their list.  It may be that the big memory leak in a third-party library that has you wanting to rewrite a subsystem is conquered in production by having a script reset the service every night.

Existing Code and Libraries

It’s very easy to underestimate the value of existing libraries and practices in effectively solving problems.  When faced with a new assignment, your developers can draw from a large pool of existing, tested solutions to a range of the more mundane, plumbing aspects of the solution.  This includes storing user information, reliably working with data storage, security systems, and other functional requirements that aren’t unique to the problem at hand.  These software libraries accrue over time as developers face similar problems even in development shops that don’t place a high emphasis on modularity and reusability – as long as you have source code control and developers that aren’t paid by the line of code, they’ll naturally find ways to adapt and remold things they’ve already done to fit new needs.

When you have a major technology shift, losing the use of this common body of code will require the first project to reinvent it.  On the surface this may seem straightforward but it’s usually held up by a desire to understand exactly how to best accomplish the same common tasks in the new environment.  For example, you might have written your own security system for your previous environment which you’ll then need to either re-implement or drop in favor of a built-in capability of the new environment you’re targeting.  What’s worse is you need to make these critical decisions at the time when you have the least experience with the new environment:  Is its built in security system really sufficient for your needs?  What about logging?

Your Customers Don’t Care

With the exception of a narrow range of situations (such as developer tools), your customers really don’t care what technology you use to implement your solution.  After all, they’re buying your solution not the technology you wrote it in.  Even if the IT representative of the evaluation team in a potential customer objects because your entire solution is written in a technology they don’t like, in the end they are often overruled unless they can point to a practical implication that you can’t mitigate.  For example, you may get overruled because it’s a Unix shop and they won’t accept a solution that only runs on Windows.  Even in the most extreme cases, if you provide enough customer value it will conquer any customer technology objection.  If the prospect has no Windows servers, that translates into a finite cost for them to support a unique system in their environment.  If your value well exceeds that, then it isn’t the key challenge to crossing the chasm to that prospect.

We often hear developers discussing internals of software development and giving them the weight of user requirements.  If it isn’t visible to the customer, it isn’t a requirement. In the end, your customers don’t pay you to have a beautiful object model.  They don’t care how hard it is for you to create your product or what hoops you have to run through.  For them, it’s a cash for capabilities decision.  It may be true that doggedly sticking with an old technology will mean you can deliver fewer features with each release, or you won’t be able to run on the latest operating system but in the eyes of your customers the question is still how compelling the functionality is and whether you can run on the operating systems they use.

Ignore the Pundits

If you’re part of a shop that has a track record of producing results, be proud.  Don’t worry about what is all the rage at producing the next social networking site, focus on what is effective for you.  For projects that can afford the risk, take the opportunity to incrementally improve your technologies and methods:  Try out a new version of the development framework or new capabilities of the latest database version.  Just remember, you can always tell the pioneers:  They’re the ones lying on the ground with the arrows sticking out of their backs.  Unless you’re part of a dedicated research team, most often you’ll get the best results by waiting for the first round of adopters to figure out what did and didn’t pan out with the newest release and then benefit from that experience.  There’s no satisfaction in burning six months working out the kinks of version 1.0 just to have everything addressed in version 1.1 published a month later.

What’s Your Experience?

Have a great story about being the pioneer, working a project that was packed to the gills with the latest and greatest, only to fall on its face?  Or perhaps you found raging success completly severing your ties with the past?  Drop me a line or leave a comment about it.