Buying silver bullets

Joel wrote about journalists periodically being taken in by product vendors’ claims that their product is going to make coding child’s play: what they hear is “programming is going to be easier.” Usually there’s some kind of Lego allusion.

Like journalists, corporate buyers are a big believers in alchemy. Extract Transform Load tools, for instance, are great for suckering the non-technical IT manager. The project needs data from external feeds and the Stone Soup vendor shows a nice-looking GUI that maps between source and destination by drawing a few lines.

“Great,” the manager says. “The business analysts can do the mapping – we don’t need to rely on those programmers that I neither understand or trust.” In the real world, the mappings end up being too complicated to effectively represent on the GUI:

• and there are a load of extra business rules that need scripting
• and there are look-ups to be coded for missing data
• and it’s a nightmare to test and next to impossible to add to continuous integration
• and you need to train a cadre of developers in the product
• and operations have yet another external product to support in production

Joel ends quoting Brooks “building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.”.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007 | Permalink | 0 Comments