McDonalds, Six Sigma, and Offshore Outsourcing (notes)
These are notes from a talk I've given in various forms at SCNA, CodeMash, and Magic Ruby. I've mirrored them here from the InfoEther weblog.
Me at SCNA
Photo credit: Monty Ksycki
The presentation is called "McDonalds, Six Sigma, and Offshore Outsourcing – Unexpected Sources of Insight". Here's the abstract:
We software developers like to think of what we do as an art form (or a craft, if you're at this conference). I was once asked to come up with a set of guidelines for creating great software so our (huge) company could more effectively use an offshore development team that had been delivering amorphous piles of crummy, nonworking code. I was frustrated and responded with something like this: "Give me a list of guidelines for how to make a beautiful song!" The nerve! Repeatable processes? Who did she think she was talking to?! This is a creative process! This is ART!!!!
I've since grown up a bit and I'd like to talk about how I was wrong and how we can all hopefully learn from my mistakes.
The Art-Craft-Commodity Continuum (from my presentation)
In it, I tell the story of my experiences with the Six Sigma quality methodology and with offshore outsourcing, urging developers not to blindly write off potentially useful software development strategies based on hearsay and misunderstanding. I also propose a customer-driven, data-driven approach to software engineering, dovetailing off of InfoEther's Chief Scientist, Glenn Vanderburg's recent ruminations on "Real Software Engineering".
The original Ronald McDonald (Willard Scott)
Videos from SCNA will be posted on InfoQ eventually, and I'll link mine here when that happens. In the mean time, many people asked me for pointers to some of the books and resources I mentioned during my presentation. Here's a link dump that you might find useful:
Wilson Pickett's Mustang Sally
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
VMG BPO – Offshore business outsourcing
Ask Sunday – Virtual Personal Assistants
GlowTouch – Low cost offshore IT outsourcing
iSixSigma – Lots of six sigma info
DMADV – the six sigma design process in a nutshell
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Forbes article on Ray Kroc and the founding of the McDonalds chains
John Zorn – Avant Garde saxophonist
Mark Rothko – Abstract Expressionist painter
Ugly Kitty Server code by me and Anthony Burns
The "I know it when I see it" Supreme Court case
Ibn Al-Haytham – inventor of the scientific method
Extreme Programming flow chart
Keavy McMinn's webblog on Ironman etc.
The Passionate Programmer – My book
