Automation changes the nature of work. It improves productivity and significantly reduces defects, by reducing opportunities for human error. Automation improves quality, while decreasing costs.
This is true for manufacturing, it is also true for software. New software products can be produced for significantly less money, in dramatically less time, with little or no defects–through extremely aggressive automation.
Automation is the future of software products as sure as it has been the path for all other commodity industries. If you are not actively engaged in discovering how to make your products a part of the software productivity revolution then it is definitely time to begin.
I’ve watched large corporate client after large corporate client offshore software development to reduce costs. May I make a suggestion?
Don’t offshore, automate. The answer to building software products faster, better, and less expensively is not cheap labor. The answer is in eliminating most costly and error prone manual labor altogether.
A study of over 30,000 software development projects reported that two-thirds experience major problems and over one-quarter fail outright. In one recent year alone over 30,000 projects failed wasting over 56 billion investment dollars1. The rate of failure is so high and the variation so great that the success or failure of any given project is, to most managers, essentially random.
It is not surprising that sponsors are reticent to support software development initiatives. It is not surprising that so many companies are eager to send software projects overseas where at least they diminish the costs of failure.
Currently, market forces are acting on the belief that the future of software development is offshore cheap labor2. The emphasis on the single characteristic of unit costs per programmer hour is tragically flawed and outdated.
Cheap labor diminishes costs, but it does not improve productivity or quality.
I am making a bold pronouncement, I say it is possible to eliminate 90% of the programming labor of most projects entirely, and I have the case studies to prove it.
Although cutting unit costs per programmer hour is a reasonable goal, the benefits gained from this approach are insignificant when compared to automating most of the programming and testing tasks and eliminating most manual labor entirely.
If you were going to dig a tunnel from England to France, would you seek to hire 5,000 Indian laborers and arm them with picks and shovels? They are really cheap per day!
No – it is an insane way to dig a tunnel. It’s an insane way to build software. Eventually the industry will wake up. But they haven’t yet. So if you learn the secrets of automation you can be way ahead of your competition.
Cheap labor WAS NOT the most efficient way to build the Chunnel.
Cheap labor IS NOT the most efficient way to build software.
Automation is.
Automation makes the current trends in off shoring software development irrelevant.
This is my notice to the software industry, it is time to seriously raise your game.
The decision to opt for offshore software development can be difficult. As anyone who has experience knows, there are advantages and disadvantages to outsourcing software development.