The Secret Sauce

All too often, software process improvement initiatives fail. In a recent post discussing SEMAT, Ralph Johnson provided some words of wisdom that serve as a wonderful guide to any team about to embark on that much vaunted software process improvement initiative.

The state of the practice in software development is pretty dismal. Some groups do a great job, but most do not.  As I tell the students in my software engineering course, if you manage requirements, make sure the developers talk to each other, release working code regularly, have some sort of a systematic testing process, use build and version control tools, and periodically stop and see how you are doing and how you can improve, you will be better than 90% of the groups out there. Of course, I could be exaggerating.  Maybe it is only better than 75%.

I suppose that pretty much sums it up! Amazing how difficult we tend to make things though, heh?

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