It seems to me that one of the most important problems in the field of software development is to understand why some teams and companies lag behind others in the speed and quality of development. You can argue about what “speed and quality of development” are, but there are some external signs that make everything clear. For example, some teams lag behind the leaders by 15 years (they write in Java 7 and there is no continuous delivery), while others lag behind by as much as 25 (there is no virtualization anywhere in the infrastructure).
If we understand the reasons for the lag, we can “pull up” the entire industry so that we make better products faster. There are many software developers in the world, 25+ million, according to Wikipedia. It would be good if these 25 million people did not waste thousands of precious hours of their lives on problems that have long been solved. It would be good if billions of users did not waste precious hours of their lives on something that does not solve their problems properly.
I don’t have a full picture of the problem yet, just bits and pieces. For example, it is known that by the fifth year of existence, teams seriously fall ill with Not invented here syndrome and their results become worse. It is known why black markets arise in companies and how to fight them. And so on, a certain number of facts have accumulated. Perhaps, in order to make a breakthrough in studying the problem, it is necessary to break some axioms.
So far it looks like it will take decades to figure this out and I think it’s a worthy endeavor. So let’s take this path :)
- The Hamming Question
- The Hamming Question: Answer