The mythical assembly line
The leadership dream that’s so harmful to software engineering teams
One of the things that leaders struggle with as they get more senior is the loss of control and visibility into what their teams are doing. Along with this comes a loss of empathy to the practice and art of building software. There is a strong desire to want to measure and therefore manage the software engineering process and to standardise the metrics and reporting of how teams build software. Companies will happily sell executives magic bullets for this which will, in turn be greedily lapped up by execs.
The reason for this is the fallacy that software engineering can be treated as an assembly line. The motivation behind this is straightforward, if we can turn software engineering into an assembly we should theoretically get the following benefits:
- Standardised processes and measurements mean decision making can be centralised and optimised. This gives executives the ability to have more oversight and therefore greater decision making power. Once we have metrics we can set targets and optimise for throughput. Throughput and control are seen as the desired outcome.
- Software engineers are expensive. If we can simplify the process of software engineering then we can replace or move them around without harming the efficiency of the line. We can pay them…
