Hello from the Ivory Tower
O'Reilly has posted an interesting interview with the Pragmatic Programmers. It shares some interesting facts about the state of software development:
“Now some 40 percent of teams in the U.S. don't use version control at all. 76 percent don't unit test, and 70 percent don't have a daily build.”
Based on the blogs I follow, those numbers appear atrociously inaccurate. Doesn't everyone use a version control system? Aren't unit tests part of the daily development process? Isn't the daily build a tradition in your shop? The sad fact remains, however, that the statistics are probably true.
Some colleagues of mine, particularly in larger businesses, lament the development “process” in place at their company. It seems the bigger the company is, the harder it is to initiate change. While I worked for a defense contractor that shall remain nameless, the explanation for this was “Steering a big ship in a new direction takes time, and we're in one of the biggest ships in the world.” The Titanic was a very large ship, indeed. It's enough to make process-savvy and agile guys like Darrel pack their bags . . .
But I digress.
The interview also offers this memorable quote:
“If you sit in your cube waiting for a spec to be thrown over the wall, then you may be in for a wait -- that spec might be in an envelope on its way to Bangalore.“
Offshoring is such a complicated issue, but the more I consider things the more truth I find in the quote above -- except it could be Beijing in a few more years, and maybe Bangkok a few years after that. Like the good Bob Reselman says: “Who knows, maybe we'll go off and do something better?”
The blog world, generally speaking, is a haven for the overachievers; we shudder to consider projects without version control, unit tests, and have elegant responses to the outsourcing question. Meanwhile, in the other 95% of the programming world, outsourcing is a constant and legitimate fear -- much more so than “if I write this code without a unit test, I'll sure regret it 3 months from now.”
I love my Ivory Tower as much as the next guy, but a dose of the brick-and-mortar tower can be a good thing too. Blogging is preaching to the choir and offers a distorted sense of the real programming community. Now, on to my unit tests . . .