Software Development

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

This is the first principle behind the agile manifesto. Most organisations claim to be customer focused and driven by the needs of their customers. But are they really? It is interesting to look at the measures these organisations use. Who do these measures actually serve? Do they answer the question are we satisfying our customers, or do they provide management information?

Today I joined many London based workers in working from home. Using the bike would make me too vulnerable and public transport meant changing trains at Clapham, one of yesterday’s scenes of violence. Like many others I had a 24 hour news channel going in the background. For the past 24 hours the usual media blame game had been diluted by the shock and outrage of the last few days events.

I have just completed an evaluation of a .NET tool. This was planned to be a review of the tool in question but I have managed to get sidetracked by what is one of the biggest debates amongst software developers. After all real developers write code – they don’t generate it. Some take this to the extreme and won’t even use third party tools or components; after all we are paid to develop software why should we pay to use someone else’s.