16.1 NO SWEAT SHOPS??”BUT NO FRITZ LANG??™S METROPOLIS
EITHER
When the authors wanted to get some shirts with our company logo, there were of
course no shops that already carried such products. Paying seamstresses to embroider
each shirt by hand would have been one approach, and indeed the common one a few
decades ago. Looking at software written by a given team today, there are a number of
similarities with that approach. Building software is labor intensive and uses generic
tools.We may have progressed from the needle and thread of Assembler to the sewing
machines of 3GLs and IDEs, but the tools are largely similar across all developers.
Despite the similar tools, the code written across all projects will show a huge amount
of variation. However, the code written in this one project should recognizably belong
together. The company coding standards, component libraries, shared architecture,
and in-house style guide should lead to the work of each developer all bearing the
???mark??? of this company and team. If it does not, the situation would be similar to each
seamstress embroidering a different version of the company logo.
This shared set of properties, or commonality, is what DSM can leverage to
improve productivity. Most organizations will already devote efforts to codifying and
sharing this information, and some may automate parts of the process.
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