Passion, facts and change
It’s easy to criticize or to be negative — especially when it comes to new ideas and concepts. It’s happened throughout our history. The concept that the Earth travels around the Sun, not vice versa, developed by Copernicus was revolutionary, quite correct and completely rejected by the Church at the time.
Remember when Java and “write once run anywhere” was devised? Well� OK “write once and run anywhere” is a little questionable, but few people got the idea or understood Java in the early days, and most expected Java would wither away.
Kathy Sierra notes there�s one real reason that people diss new things: it�s because the thing in question challenges beliefs or ideas they have invested in heavily. They could have invested time or money, or staked their reputation.
“They’ll diss things because embracing those things might force them to re-examine thoughts and assumptions they care about, or because those things represent a change they don’t want to make,” Kathy says. She goes on, that the less someone knows about a subject, the more passionate the dissing.
The changes we are in the midst of today are once again challenging some old ways of working. Turn-around times in software development projects are speeding up, development teams are becoming distributed and harder to manage, and there is a greater focus on quality and return on investment by the business.
These require a more flexible and predictive way of running projects. It’s no longer good enough to steer projects using gut instinct or to tear everything down and start the next project from scratch, without carrying over best practices and lessons learned from the previous effort. There’s too much at stake in terms of saving money and reducing your exposure to risk.
Yet people can be slow to embrace the changes these challenges demand. Either, people think everything will be OK because they’ve done this kind of thing before, or they get religion about the tools they already have.
On the first point, things could well be OK, but surely the question becomes: how can you make things even better? On the latter, it’s fine to use existing tools - we encourage it - but these tools will probably fail to provide an accurate or impartial view of the entire development ecosystem, because they are tied to a single vendor’s stack.
Facts can be uncomfortable things to face but facing them is the first step on the road towards self-improvement. That’s why 6th Sense Analytics’ tools give people the facts they need to run software projects under today’s changing requirements. We also give people the information in real-time, while also providing a complete view across the entire application development stack.
Who can argue with that?
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