Some Fool s Gold Is Silver

Some Fool's Gold Is Silver

Technologies and methodologies that are associated with extravagant productivity claims are called "silver bullets" because they are supposed to slay the werewolf of low productivity.^[9] For decades, the software industry has been plagued by claims that the UmptyFratz Innovation dramatically improves development speed. In the 1960s, on-line programming was as so ciated with this claim. In the 1970s, it was third-generation languages. In the 1980s, advocates for artificial intelligence and CASE tools made these promises. In the 1990s, object-oriented programming was lauded as the next great productivity boon. In the early 2000s, it was development in Internet time.

Suppose that a stone-block project team starts out using the brute-force method to move the stone block. After a few days, the team leader can see that progress isn't fast enough to meet the project's goals. Fortunately, he has heard of an amazing animal called an "elephant." Elephants can weigh almost 100 times as much as an adult human being and are extremely powerful. The project leader mounts an expedition to capture and bring back an elephant to help the team move the block. After a three-week safari, the team returns with a captive elephant. They harness the magnificent beast to the block and crack the whip. They hold their collective breath, waiting to see just how fast the elephant will move the block. They may even finish ahead of schedule! As they watch, the elephant begins pulling the block forward, much faster than the team of humans had ever been able to accomplish. But then, unexpectedly, the elephant rears on its hind legs. It breaks its harness, tramples two of its handlers, and runs off at 40 kilometers per hour, never to be seen again (as shown in Figure 2-7). The stone-block team is dejected. "Maybe we should have spent more time learning how to handle the elephant before we started using him on a real project," they thought. They wasted more than 20 percent of their schedule looking for the elephant, lost two of their teammates, and are no closer to the goal than when they started.

Figure 2-7. Silver bullet innovations often fall short of expectations.

That, in a nutshell, is Silver Bullet Syndrome.

The elephant analogy is more apt than you might think. Robert L. Glass chronicles 16 troubled projects in Software Runaways.^[10] Four of the projects he describes expected to be breakthrough successes because of their use of silver bullet innovations. Instead, they ended up failing because of the same innovations.

A special kind of silver bullet is forged from attempts to implement organizational process improvement half-heartedly. Some organizations try to implement organizational improvement with buzzwords TQM, QFD, SW-CMM, Zero Defects, Six Sigma, Continuous Improvement, Statistical Process Control these are all valuable practices when properly applied by focusing on the substance of the practice and not just the form. But each of these practices is virtually worthless when applied as buzzwords. Some organizations cycle through them in 12-month intervals, as if ritualistically chanting the initials of a current management fad could call forth improvements in quality and productivity. A special place in low-productivity hell is reserved for these organizations. After years of Management By Buzzword (MBB), entire staffs become cynical about organizational improvement initiatives in general, which adds one more challenge to escaping from code-and-fix development.

The right innovation applied to the right project, supported by appropriate training and deployed with realistic expectations can be tremendously beneficial as a long-term strategy. But new innovations aren't magic and they aren't easy. When they are adopted with a get-rich-quick attitude, innovations become fool's gold.