Opinion: Development managers concede that they measure code quality too little, too late.
When 216 Java development managers were asked this summer about
their biggest frustrations in deploying high-quality code, 40 percent
of them admitted that they dont even measure code quality in more than
half of their projects; in the projects where code quality is being
measured, the same group estimated that almost a third of those
monitoring efforts dont begin until the project is more than half
complete. Those were the findings that really jumped out at me in a
report produced by the Princeton, N.J., research firm Clear
Horizons and released
last week by the study sponsor, the Enerjy Software division of
Teamstudio Inc., in Beverly, Mass.
I spoke with Enerjy CEO Nigel Cheshire at this years JavaOne
conference and again following the release, early this month, of his
companys code quality management suite Enerjy CQ2.
Cheshire pulls no punches when talking about the difficulty of getting
good measurement tools introduced into working development
organizations: "Our whole philosophy--borne out by experience--is
ZIP, Zero Impact on Process. The only way you can be successful with
tools is to minimize their impact on their process day to day," he told
me during our JavaOne conversation in June. In practical terms, he
continued, that means a combination of process automation, overall code
quality elevation, and improvement of individual developer performance
through measurement and feedback.
When Cheshire looked at the tools available to development managers,
he told me, he was struck by the degree to which they were really just
project management tools rather than development management tools. I
hadnt thought about the difference before, but hes right: Many tools
will let you track the progress of a project by tasks and milestones,
just as I used to track the progress of equipment fabrication and
installation at the Exxon Chemical plant in Baton Rouge, but thats
hardly the same thing as documenting the performance of each
developers code as it makes its way through an automated suite of unit
tests. The latter, of course, is the kind of thing that can pinpoint
the sources of delay in a coding project, where the difference between
an outstanding developer and a marginal contributor is more
than double the difference between mediocrity and excellence in
most other crafts.
Better tools and better measurements, leading to better processes,
are crucial to the reproducibility and profitability of the growing
services sector in IT--a goal thats being addressed by the Technology Professional Services
Association, formed last month and hitting its stride with this
weeks Webcast
announcement of The Service 50: the most influential solution
providers. I cant tell you wholl be at the head of the list, but the
Top 10 firms (in alphabetical order) will be Accenture, Affiliated
Computer Services, Cisco, Computer Sciences Corp., EDS,
Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Unisys and Xerox. The full Top
50 rankings will be announced on Thursday beginning at 2 p.m.
EDT.
Tell me what you measure, and whose solutions you find serviceable,
at peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com
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