Often times, I wonder if software developers are really deploying something or just winging it. So, who better to ask than Mary and Tom Poppendieck.
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Joe: Data is still king though, isn’t it? I mean, we have to deploy something. We have to be able to measure it though. Do you agree with that or can we wing it?
Mary: Let’s pretend you’re Amazon. You’re deploying a new service, just a small part of your system, and you deploy it when you are ready. That small thing is meant to do something to attract a few more customers, run a test to see if you supply extra information, on checkouts you might make customers happier, or add a few more options to the review, or something like that.
There’s no sense in waiting. Why not try that and see how it goes? In fact, you could be running good old marketing style AB experiments all the time if you can deploy frequently. If you don’t deploy except for every month or two, there’s no way to be running experiments to see whether this various, this approach or that approach, is, in fact, a better one.
Tom: You have to think that your goal is learning. L what the best solution for one aspect or another of delighting the customer will require. If you learn that your hypothesis is wrong, why take that code out. If you learn your hypothesis is correct, you continue along that direction or go onto your next understanding of what will delight your customer.
Learning is the key thing, not generating code. Generating code is merely a means. It’s not the purpose.
Joe: This also means with the user or with the customer. It’s not an “internal customer” that we’re deploying this too.
Mary: We tend to see software as a product and in fact, a large amount of the companies we work with are companies that actually make software-intensive products. You can think of anything from a medical device with a lot of software in it, to a website which allows people to buy stuff, to something like social media website, or Twitter, or anything like that.
Those are all software products which people use all the time. It’s the customers who are using that software? intensive product that are bringing revenue to the company, and those are the ones that you want to figure out how to make their lives easier.
Tom: Even for internal software, the product is not software. The product is an improved business process that either goes faster, generates more revenue, reduces errors, saves time, improves sales or whatever.
The business process is what matters. That’s where the return comes from. Your success of your product, of your software development, is not measured by cost, schedule, scope, or guesses of what it should take. It is measured by did you have an impact on the way the business process works that the organization was hoping for. That’s what success means.
Even internally, you have to look at the real product and not measure your success based on the software metrics.
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