Software Delivery Today

Software delivery today is in a state of crisis, and has been for decades. There is little recognition that available approaches are inadequate for meeting the needs of businesses of all stripes.

Of course, available approaches are seen as sufficient. But they do not deal adequately with the challenges we face in the day-to-day work of delivering solutions that meet folks’ needs. And in particular the need for predictability, flexibility and economy. We become swamped by the complexity of large solutions, lost in a maze of folks’ needs, and mystified by confusing and ambiguous priorities.

When we look at the typical mix of deployed solutions assembled from multiple sources, the situation is even worse.

The crisis in software delivery is far greater in overall magnitude at least than the situation of the early noughties. A situation that led to the spread of Agile approaches to relieve the burden of long timescales, delivering the wrong things, and highly risky schedules. The challenges are harder to solve and the costs of not solving them are in the $trillions. “The symptoms appear in the form of disengaged and demotivated employees, disgruntled and disappointed customers, unreliable, excessively expensive, untimely, inflexible and ultimately unsuitable solutions.”

There are ways to improve things a little, are they are slowly gaining recognition. But to achieve a fundamental jump in our delivery capabilities, we need to rethink what we doing, from first principles, and using a different frame.

– Bob

Further Reading

Firment, D. (2017). Tear Down The Wall Of Confusion. [online] Medium. Available at: https://cloudrumblings.io/devops-tear-down-the-wall-46656151d71d [Accessed 23 May 2022].