Pragmatic Dictator

A couple of false economies software development indulges in:

1. It’s quicker for me to write the code than explain the design to someone else.
2. Automated deployment will have to wait until we have more time.

Number one costs a software development team in a number of ways:

• The career development of other members of the team is slowed - if one never discusses design how does one expect to obtain good designers or architects?
• The team’s development capacity is reduced - essentially projects bottleneck around the uncommunicative heroic individual.
• The team’s effectiveness is reduced - project load cannot be divided efficiently because individuals have skills in narrow areas limiting the breadth of work they can perform.
• Team morale is damaged with other developers feeling left out, unfulfilled and unable to influence project decisions

Number two yields costs including:

• We save on some development time but the cost is re-surfacing in staff-hours required to perform the deployment.
• An increasing number of mistakes that extend deployment time or breaks releases.
• We save development time once and pay the price for that saved time with each and every deployment.
• The cost of each successive deployment increases because the system’s size is growing.
• As each deployment takes ever longer, the gap between releases is likely to increase.