Concurrent software development
Joseph D. Blackburn, Gary D. Scudder, Luk N. Van Wassenhove · Communications of the ACM · 2000
By necessity, software development has become a critical skill for many industrial firms.Software that captures the intellectual assets of the firm in its products and services increasingly defines the critical path in development and thus governs the firm's speed-to-market.When embedded in hardware, such as with a television or an office copier, software can be a particularly strong determinant of development cycle time.What happens when software development exceeds its time targets and is late to market?One example, widely reported in the press, illustrates that dilatory software development can devastate the bottom line and affect the boardroom.In 1994, Novell purchased WordPerfect for over $855 million in an effort to create an integrated software product to compete with Microsoft's Office suite; Novell later sold WordPerfect (and Quattro) to Corel for $186 million.What caused the calamitous 80% drop in market value?Simply Novell's inability to keep apace with Microsoft in the race to bring new software features to market.Speed is obviously a key to retaining a competitive edge in these markets.Software productivity is another key development performance metric with direct financial consequences.Firms such as Microsoft recognize that software development is a fixed cost business with virtually no variable production costs; higher productivity thus results in lower input costs, and higher profit margins [6].The twin objectives of speed and productivity raise vexing issues for a software development manager.Cycle time and productivity are not perfectly correlated because a developer can achieve a shorter cycle time even with low productivity, by adding developers to the project.Brooks [4] and others have noted that the practice of adding bodies to a project to lower cycle time may have the opposite result, since coordination complexities make larger teams more difficult to manage.With low productivity, speed is achieved at high cost.Fortunately, the pursuit of speed and productivity is not a zero-sum game.The