Strange how the truth can be funny
This is meant to be humorous. And it is. But it is also realistic. Oftentimes, we techies forget that the reason people pay us to develop software is to provide value to the business paying for the software, be it the company we work for, the client, or the people who buy our shrinkwrap. It doesn’t matter how elegant the solution is, if the solution doesn’t make business sense (i.e. pay for itself, at the very least), then the effort taken to produce the solution is wasted.
I have been reading Return on Software. It’s a decent book – reminds me of all of those classes I took in my undergraduate work (my degree is in Quantitative Business Analysis). The author spends a little too much time on the math, but then again, I’m only about 1/3 of the way through the book, so he has basically only been laying the groundwork for the rest of the book. I’ll write a full review when I finish, but suffice it to say that, even if the book isn’t that good (actually, it’s not too bad – not the greatest book I’ve read, but not bad), the concepts it contains are terribly important to our industry, and constantly overlooked.