Soul-Less Software Development

One of the common objections to organizational improvement is that it imposes creativity-limiting bureaucracy. This is reminiscent of the old objection that engineering and art are incompatible. It is possible to create an oppressive environment in which programmer creativity and business goals are placed at odds, just as it is possible to create ugly buildings. But it is just as possible to set up an environment in which software developer satisfaction and business goals are in harmony, and industry data bears this out. Of people who were surveyed about the effects of the SW-CMM, 84 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with the claim that SW-CMM-based improvement made their organizations more rigid or bureaucratic.

Organizations that have focused on organizational improvement have found that effective processes support creativity and morale. In a survey of about 50 organizations, only 20 percent of the people in Level 1 organizations rated their staff morale as "good" or "excellent."^[9] The responses listed were consistent across managers, developers responsible for organizational improvement, and general senior technical staff members. In organizations rated at Level 2, the proportion of people who rated their staff morale as "good" or "excellent" jumped to 50 percent. And, in organizations rated at Level 3, 60 percent of the people rated their morale as "good" or "excellent."

These summary statistics are confirmed by in-depth analysis of organizations that have achieved the highest process effectiveness ratings. A survey at Ogden Air Logistics Center, one of the first organizations to be assessed at SW-CMM Level 5, found that software workers were enthusiastic about the changes brought about by their eight-year improvement effort.^[10] Respondents did feel that the Level 5 processes constrained the way they could perform their work, but the constraint was seen as an inevitable side effect of becoming more effective and wasn't considered to be negative. Software workers felt that it was much easier to perform their work than it had been before organizational improvement. The vast majority felt that they had more input into project planning and control. Every survey respondent felt that the SW-CMM initiative had been a positive influence.

The on-board shuttle software group at NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center is another organization that has been assessed at Level 5.^[11] You won't find mounds of pizza boxes, pyramids of Coca-Cola cans, rock-climbing walls, skateboard parks, or any of the other trappings found in more stylish software organizations. The emphasis is not on playing games; it is on making perfect software. The work is exciting, but it is not all-consuming. The space shuttle group generally works 8 to 5. In an industry dominated by males, about half of this software group is female.

People who leave such high-performance groups are sometimes shocked by how inefficient the average organization is. One person left the Johnson Space Flight Center for a more entrepreneurial environment, only to return a few months later. He commented that the company he went to paid lip service to developing software effectively, but their approach was really code-and-fix development. Far from finding high maturity environments limiting, people in those environments achieve levels of productivity and quality that are simply not possible in lower maturity environments. The ATAMS project described earlier used highly structured work practices that some developers might find restrictive, but the ATAMS team members said they felt the process brought out everyone's best performance. They said they would be reluctant to develop software without it.