Archive for May, 2007
Swissmade IT Software & Hardware
May 1st, 2007Update: This idea has been implemented by Swiss Made Software
Did you know that some quite famous pieces of software and developments in software engineering were indeed created, or at least strongly influenced, by Swiss people?
- Pascal Programming Language (N. Wirth)
- Modula-2 Programming Language (N. Wirth)
- Software Design Patterns (Eric Gamma)
- Prepaid cellular phones (Walter Heutschi)
Some well known international companies in this field are
- Logitech
- Kudelski
- Day
Interestingly enough, however, none of these advertise their Swissness. There is no common label like “Swiss Cheese”, “Swiss Chocolate” or “Swiss Watches”. Why?
What we need is a label for Swiss-made IT products. We need to have a quality standard associated with it, and put the label on every IT product that comes from Switzerland! If you like the idea, help to make it happen.
Is offshoring buggy?
May 1st, 2007Ed Yourdon has an interesting summary on Michael Mah’s analysis of offshored software projects, where he concludes that such projects have 2.8x as many bugs as projects that are “co-located” with end-users. Mah’s study was a very interesting read because it collects data around a feeling that I have hold for quite some time now: If people speaking the same language, located in the same timezone, having a similar cultural background or at least a similar social environment, cannot communicate effectively - how can people not sharing any of the before mentioned?
Top questions to consider:
- what’s the bug rate with your offshored projects, compared to “co-located”, non-outsourced projects?
- what will you do against this trend?
- will the situation improve or worsen if you apply a waterfall, high-ceremony process to it?