| I gravitated into the process world several years ago after performing
almost all roles in the software engineering environment — both as a
programmer and in various management positions. That environment
covered both the commercial software development world and the government
contracting software development world. I kept getting back to
a process focus after personally witnessing complete disasters with socalled
process-rich environments and alternatively process-sparse environments.
I often ran into “process people” who lost sight of the fact that
processes were there to support the organization — not the other way
around! Frustrations at all levels have been enormous for software engineering
personnel.
I was in the trenches and in software management during the U.S.
government’s push for making Department of Defense (DoD) software
contractors conform to standards like MIL-Std-1679, DoD-Std-2167, and,
later, DoD-Std-2167A. The government’s zeal in getting pesky contractors
in line during that period resulted in vast documentation standards requirements
throughout the development life cycle — even when those deliverables
were illogical at various times in the life cycle. Companies were
unsuccessfully trying to force a real-world development life cycle onto a
waterfall-based model from the government. The government openly
advocated tailoring the imposed model, but when you did just that,
government employees suspected you of trying to get away with something,
and thus effective tailoring was not done. I was there and I know
what really went on to try to conform. The government related document
production to project progress regardless of document quality. Repeatability
translated into creating a standard set of documents with standard
formats. Software contractors ended up in the document business rather
than the software business to a large extent. The government alleged to
just describe “what” had to be done but the same government had all
kinds of “how-tos” included as well — including defining low-level
document formats via Data Item Descriptions (DIDs) for just about everything.
Woe betide anyone who deviated from any government DID —
even if it made sense! The cost of government-imposed “process” was
enormous with questionable value, in my opinion. |
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