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Clarification: I'm referring to companies that pay developers, professionally. I understand why a "hobby" or "for fun" developer wouldn't want to (or couldn't afford) a fully-features pay tool, and may prefer to tinker. I'm talking about situations where a deadline is bearing down on a developer/company and development time is diverted away from the goal in pursuit of a "Free" tool to accomplish what a pay one is available to do.
I've noticed a number of Stack Overflow questions recently (they're not new, I've just recently taken notice) where people are searching for free alternatives to popular development tools for things like ALM, database comparison, and other functions for which there's a trivially costly pay alternative. The "Free" tag on Stack Overflow has 350 questions, and it doesn't take long to see dozens of examples of "Is there a FREE tool to do X?" followed by discussions that must have taken the asker hours to research and participate in.
It's not just about paying less - I'm often amazed at the hoops that some developers (or, perhaps more accurately, their companies) will go through to avoid paying for something - in some cases, a pay solution will be avoided in favor of a poorly documented, buggy, feature-incomplete open-source solution that results in dozens of hours of work that could have been avoided.
I understand the most obvious reasons:
Company is short on cash
Don't pay for something when a (functionally-comparable) free alternative is available
"Hobby" developers don't have the cash to spare, and since they're just learning, it doesn't make sense to pay for a toolset they're only tinkering with
However, I think the "short on cash" reasoning is completely bogus - as a developer not long out of college, I made about $50K annually, or $200/day (meaning my company probably paid close to $300/day to have me in my chair, all considered). When you compare that price to a $300 tool, the obvious answer is "if it's going to waste more than a day of your time, you should buy it instead and get back to work". However, that's not what I observe - people seem willing to kill dozens of hours to avoid paying for something that only costs $50.
Help me understand - as a developer myself of tools I'd like to one day sell, I want to understand the mentality. Have I been spoiled by working at a company that's not afraid to spend? Is there an ingrained reason developers (or their companies) don't want to spend money? Can people not accurately estimate the costs of "Free" tools in terms of lost productivity?
I'm not referring to instances where a great free alternative is available. For example, any of these tools is a great example of something you shouldn't pay for. However, let's say one of those lacks a key feature you need, and which a pay version of the same library provides - people seem to lean towards hacking around with the free version to add the needed functionality (or scaffold in the needed functionality) instead of ditching the free tool in favor of the pay (and feature-complete) version. I'm not saying that's the wrong choice, but it's just a choice I want to understand the reasoning to. The important point is that I'd like to - my intent is not to be argumentative.
What you're not considering are Dependencies and Partnerships.
It's great when companies announce "Partnerships", their marketing and legal teams spend ages wording contracts and press briefings that basically announce "We're now joined at the hip!".
What you may not realise, is that every time you choose to use a 3rd party tool you are tying yourself to that company, unlike a partnership the dependancy only goes one way (like the Marketing and Legal blurb).
What happens if they decide to cancel the product?
Or they change how it works, and suddenly it's not compatible with how you are using it?
Or they double their yearly developer licence?
Here we use lots of open source tools, while there is only "community level support" and the ramp up time may be longer than for an off the shelf tool, we consider that worth the price we're paying.
We are part of that community. If a version is released that breaks our software, we have choices, we can continue with the version we're using, and choose to maintain that version our selves. Or we can participate in the project and patch the code so it will continue to work for us.
If the open source project falls by the way side, we're still left with access to the source code, so we can continue to build and maintain that too if we wish.
We believe going open source gives us far more freedom than tying ourselves to other companies, who can (and do) change their pricing policies.
Cost-per-developer next year could be twice what it is this year. Changing to a different product could equally cost as much or more.
My two cents.
Where I work I can download the free opensource tool the minute I find it. I don't even have to tell my boss that I'm using it.
If I find a non-free tool I might be able to download a free trial, without telling the boss, but if I want to buy the full version of the tool I'll definitely gonna have to talk to my boss and he's not just gonna give it to me. I'm gonna have to motivate why I need it. He is definitely gonna ask if there are any free alternatives and "I don't know." is not a good enough answer. So if I want the non-free tool I'm gonna have to evaluate all the free tools first.
If I convince my boss that I need the tool, he's gonna send a request to another department that's in charge of this kind of purchases and he's gonna have to convince that department that our department needs the tool. Usually not a problem, but sometimes it is.
Anyway, when we tell our boss that we need something it can take weeks before we get it. Therefore it's often much quicker to just use a free opensource tool and not bother going through that process.
I imagine that other work places might have a similar situation.
Two points to consider:
You're a professional software engineer. Not everyone interested in software development is. For some people, this is a hobby... and paying a few hundred bucks for a profiler (or whatever) just isn't worth it.
You're in the US, and assuming US-style income. That's far from universal.
First off, not everyone asking may be funded by a company.
Second, despite the time savings, ideally the salary for an employee is a sunk cost, it's already been budgeted and allocated. There very well may be "no more money".
When you look at licensing, that $300 thing is $300 for Tom, but then he can't let Joe, Frank, and Bob use it. All of a sudden, if the tool is popular, now it's even more costly. It's not like buying a stapler. And then you get back to what was ostensibly a petty cash purchase now becomes a capital purchase.
A free tool can be downloaded and used instantly (usually). Buying even a $50 tool can take a week getting the check from accounting, THEN it can be downloaded.
Finally, many times folks are looking for some little specific piece of a tool, not the entire suite. Yet they're forced to purchase the entire thing. The Whiz Bang Ka-Blammo Enterprise Tool Set when they're only interesting in the 17th bullet point off the feature list.
I'm never afraid to go to my boss at work and ask him to pay for some tools that will help to make me more productive. However, the work that I do for myself, and much of it is as complex as what I get paid for, has to be done with free or nearly-free tools. I have paid for some things where the cost-to-value ratio is really compelling, like Wing IDE for Python development. Visual Studio, on the other hand, is so expensive that I just can't rationalize the cash outlay no matter how great it is.
I certainly appreciate the rationale behind this question. If you are thinking about being a professional tools developer, you have to wonder if it is going to be possible to make any money at it. I would say that you have to very carefully consider what you charge for your products. While you can charge enterprise-class customers hundreds of dollars for a tool, and they won't blink at it, making the sale in the first place is an enormous challenge. With my startup company, we found that it took about a year to go from first handshake to getting a signature on a check. That's a long, long time when you are starving and living off of your savings.
On the other hand, if you can charge less and make it a compelling purchase for an individual developer who is reaching into his or her own wallet for a personal credit card, you can achieve the kind of decision-maker mind share that can greatly short circuit the year-long enterprise sales cycle.
A developer is paid, and generally motivated, to develop stuff.
Picking up a free library takes a bit of research, but then you can pull it in, try it, and keep doing that until you find one that fits. The process of selecting the appropriate free library/tool fits well into the developer's skill set.
In a business, you're right that it's possible to buy good tools. However, to do this you need to make a business case for the cost, and persuade your manager (and probably further up the chain too) that it's worth paying. This requires an entirely different skill set, and one which would take many developers outside their comfort zone. Most of the time, I think developers just can't motivate themselves to start down this route.
Even if "the company" might want to spend money on tools if it's cost-effective to do so, the average developer is not correctly motivated to support this company goal.
Going back to your original question, you were interested in how to sell development tools in this climate, when developers have this tendency to pick the free ones. Based on the above I see two options:
Make it compelling to the developer, so they think it's worth the politicking time to get their hands on it. Time-limited trial versions etc can help here: once the dev has learnt the tool and seen what it can do, they'll not only be happier to ask their boss to spend the money, they'll be better prepared to justify the spending in terms of time already saved.
Make it compelling to the manager, either so the developer knows they'll have an easy sell if they ask, or to skip the individual developer level altogether and sell directly to management. Anything with "enterprise" in the name is taking this approach.
I think there's a mental block against paying for something when you can develop it for "free". I think often developer time is seen as a base cost, something you're paying for anyway, so the additional time spent developing a tool isn't seen as an additional cost, it's something you're already paying for.
The complete opposite exists too. Some developers will blindly buy the first thing they bump into. But I think a lot of developers have various unhappy experiences with paid-for software. Community support can suck. Paid support can suck. Some people get disillusioned with the whole closed-source thing and prefer something open source just because it's open source.
As you're focussing on trying to eventually sell something, here are a few tips to convince people to stop hopping once they've found your wonder product:
State the features. I've too often found a site talking about a widget that just bombards me with latest news, changelogs, prices, yada yada... But doesn't tell me what it actually does! The first paragraph should concisely explain what it does.
Provide lots of example code, sample projects, documentation. Tons of it. The more use-cases the better. Now of course you also need to provide a navigation system so the user can find things but the more examples, samples and docs you provide, the quicker the user can test your whatsit.
Trials make the world go round. If you can, make sure I can test it before handing you any money. If I can't, I, personally, won't be buying it. Money back guarantees come in a close second but as I say, if I can't test it out, however good it looks, you're not getting my money.
Companies I've worked for look for free alternatives (and usually I mean really free, not just free of charge) because "pay ones" often have (or get over time) restrictive licenses on redistribution. I don't want to base my whole product around a for-pay library only to find out that I now have to pay them $1000 per copy I sell.
As a matter of fact, I earned a bunch of money last year porting a product that had been written using a third party web crawler/indexer over to use Nutch instead because the person who'd paid for the product to get written in the first place didn't realize that the third party web crawler/indexer was going to cost her more per license than she was planning to charge for the whole product, and because she also didn't realize that the third party product was built for intranet rather than internet crawling and so ignored robots.txt.
Some times the "management" does not want to buy anything for the "developer" thinking that the latter is getting paid to develop the software. I've been in situations like that and it was really hard to convince the mangement to buy a set of UI controls we needed for a web application.
I personally prefer free tools, because learning how to use a tool is not 5 minutes. to really master the tool you need to spend a lot of time using it. Id rather not waste time in learning something that is not universal and cant be used always. learn once, use anywhere.
Many of those payed software is not that amazing for me to fight with my boss for it. Total Commander is the only tool that is worth the fight, however from time to time I look for free alternatives and I even consider writing one myself.
When was the last time you read your GNU manifesto. Has the concept of copy left been forgotten? Maybe you've forgotten your roots. The world of software development started from the sweat of the "hobby" or "for fun" developer. Remember those two developers in their garage who later made and sold those operating systems? It is not only a part of our heritage to hack out our own solutions but it's in our blood as well.
Also, companies of the pay-to-use solutions are trying to make money. While a good business model will include helping the customer achieve their goals, making money is their first priority and has a good chance of getting in the way of development progress. The free to use community on the other hand, from what I understand, is purely altruistic and has only the utility of the software thing in mind. The community of free-to-use, copyleft, open-source is very strong.
Ideas/concepts were meant to be shared (freely) to advance us as a people.
Sometimes you need free tools if you are not sure will the result bring you enough money. For example you established startup that works on creating app (or site). They don't want to spend money on third-party tools because they can't be sure will it bring money or not.
Another case, i once worked for big company and their budget approval process took too long, i have to find free stuff at least on initial stage.
Have you noticed that most free tools come without warranty (see GNU Public License, v.2) or support? I use tons of 'free' software every day, because as a hobby, I like to develop too. And a good application always gets bought, but back to the why's.
The FOSS community is a large one, most applications are free. Hence, it wouldn't be a strange question to ask for a free or an open source alternative, because well, there are a lot.
A free ride is always better than a paid one. Depends on the attraction, though. Some paid ones are better or far worse. (Babes, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Vim) comment: "Babes" is not a program.
Some commercial applications require you to pay by creditcard payment. I hate online payments, and I double hate creditcards. I triple hate how companies store my personal information.
Not everyone is a software engineer. Some of us, do this just for fun :D (Linus Torvalds, Matz, Guido, Larry...go on, go on....)
Another line of thought here is how well are those superior pay ones known to everyone? For example, how am I supposed to know every kind of add-in that Visual Studio has? While some may say, "Well, you aren't," then this is another reason for some to not find those great tools out there. Some may be easy to discover and others may require one to know some jargon phrase in order to use some Google Fu to find it.
Another point is what some companies may or may not realize about how they are spending their money. For example, some developers may have some pretty sizeable hoops to go through to get the company to buy licenses for some tools, especially if every developer would have to have a license and some aren't that cheap to get. How well the managers know what their developers are actually doing and what kinds of changes could be made for the better with a little money could shock some people while in other cases the learning curve on using the tool may also be seen as a barrier in some ways as well as another thing to keep track since some tools are available on a subscription-like model rather than an outright buy it once model.
Seemingly since that time when programming and development came into existence there has been an ebb and flow between the commercial and the non-commercial -- these days more accurately described as 'corporate America' and the 'open source community', respectively. I personally chalk all of that up the existence of middle men and profiteers.
On the subject of freeware, I feel as '01' above -- a free tool allows evaluation at my own pace, potentially preventing the waste of valuable funding, which is an important consideration in this current economy.
Shareware is a fine balance, but I personally find most software doesn't provide adequate time for evaluation. Most tools I download are 'once-a-month' endeavors at their highest frequency so plunking down $30-$60 (U.S.) seems unjustified until I know the tool lives up to my desires.
And regarding professional tools, we all know the goals of business. I find the terms and conditions of Scooter Software to be most logical and accommodating. I've used their Beyond Compare tool for years and years -- as a developer invaluable I've found it both valuable and unequaled.
As to your personal dilemma, make your tools good enough, offer good shareware evaluation terms, and charge a reasonable price for it. Choosing popular (and multiple) platforms also doesn't hurt... consider the number of folks who've made a mint selling iPhone applications, regardless of those applications actual utility.
I'm talking about situations where a deadline is bearing down on a developer/company and development time is diverted away from the goal in pursuit of a "Free" tool to accomplish what a pay one is available to do.
This is exactly the situation when you can't use a paid for tool because petty cash/expenses won't cover the cost and getting budgetary approval takes weeks to come through.
Number three from 9 Ways Marketing Weasels Will Try to Manipulate You. It's "Free"! People make irrational decisions about free stuff.
I think that it makes a lot of sence for companies to try to use free/open source products for the following reasons:
Reduce the price of the deliverable product. Why would you expect a customer to buy something that works with a proprietary database when the company can bundle MySQL for example for free? So the company can lower the price and be more competitive.
Usually when buying software/tools, there are proprietary issues.
Usually when buying software/tools, there are dependencies to other also non-free modules.
There are other reasons also, like that IMHO it is considered "trendy", but the most improntant is that the use of free software can cut down the final prices, helping the company gain customers.
It is also important to support the free tools by adding to the momentum of it, sometimes by the simple fact of starting to use it. By finding/reporting bugs, or more importantly, fixing them and giving patches back, you improve them in a symbiotic relationship that benefits both your company and the tools you decide to use (and hence everybody else who also use them).
One good reason to look for free tools is to get a complete overview of the available options. I'd say that's a reasonable thing to do before you buy a product. Commercial software vendors have advertisements, so you'll probably find those, but there might be a great free alternative that you never heard of. It makes perfect sense to check that, even if you are willing to spend money on software tools.
Plain and simple some companies like IQPC.com will not spend even $10 on software and it's even hard in places like this to find a pen or pad to take notes.
I shed a tear for those who have to live like this, it's not easy.
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Hey all. I would like to get some insight on a question that I have been trying to find some information about. If you are the solo developer that is building a project from ground up, how do you manage the project? In the past, I have worked on a few personal projects that have grown into fairly large projects. In almost all of those projects, I have tried to wear the hats of all the roles that would normally be in place during a normal software development project (i.e. Product Owner, developer, architect, tester, etc.). It seems that when I leave the project for some time and come back, it is extremely hard to get back into the rhythm of what I was doing. So with that, I have some questions:
If I know the requirements (at this
current time), do I record them
anyways? If so, how do I go about
doing this, and how do I manage these
requirements? Product backlog,
features list, etc?
If this is the case, are full blown product backlogs or use cases a little overkill?
How does one efficiently appropriate
his/her time to each respective role?
What would be a normal flow of events
that one would follow? Start coding
immediately, write down user
stories/use cases, then go into
OOA/D?
What diagramming/modeling would be sufficient for this level? Domain model, class diagram, etc?
Basically, I was curious how everyone out there in the SO community would go about developing a project from inception to deployment when you are the lone, solo developer. What steps, documentation, and other project related activities are needed to help bring this project from an impractical, hobby project to something more professional? Any help, references, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
The most difficult part, I have found, about developing solo is that it's just tough to keep yourself driving forward. Even if you're doing this to make a living (AKA, running your own software business), unless you have pressing needs (AKA, you're going to starve if you don't make money) it can be difficult to sit down and just code.
From your perspective, I would recommend following good software practices where it makes sense to. For example, if I were a solo software developer, I would have no reason to create a collaborative development environment. All I really need is an SVN server, my IDE, and a place to record documentation (might setup a wiki or a website or something). I would personally create a realistic schedule to follow and would work on sticking to that.
As for level of effort of documentation, that really depends on you and the product you are developing. For example, I would definitely recommend recording your requirements. Unless your product is trivial, there is no way you'll remember them all and why you wanted certain ones over others. Managing a full backlog, however, can be a job in and of itself. In the solo programmer case this may not make sense.
Basically, the point I'm trying to get across (and should be followed with every project - not just in this case) is have just enough management that makes sense. The rest should be focused on the work and the development of the product.
Something else you may want to look into is reading this - Agile Programming Works for the Solo Developer. There are other, similar, articles out there. Might give you some good thoughts.
If I know the requirements (at this
current time), do I record them
anyways? If so, how do I go about
doing this, and how do I manage these
requirements? Product backlog,
features list, etc?
I have two lists of features:
A high-level view which states the scope of the finished product
A list of the features which I'm implementing in this iteration
Because I don't need to communicate it to other people (yet) I tend to write down the things that I don't know about the project (if I already know it there's no need to write it down): it's when it gets too complicated, or when there are details which I haven't defined but need to define, that I start to define them in writing.
I did however try to investigate/make a business-case for the project before starting coding.
How does one efficiently appropriate
his/her time to each respective role?
I did non-programmer, product-owner thinking at times when I had to be away from the computer anyway.
Apart from that, my cycle is:
Implement more functionality
Integration-test it
[repeat as above]
Every 3 to 6 months I compare the new-functionality-accomplished against my estimated schedule, and then recalibrate: i.e., make a new list of the highest-priority features to implement in the next few months.
What would be a normal flow of events
that one would follow? Start coding
immediately, write down user
stories/use cases, then go into OOA/D?
I started with working part-time or in my spare time, to make sure that I had:
Understood the required functionality
Made significant architectural decisions
Written any throw-away prototypes as necessary to learn new technology
After that I was ready to start developing full-time.
What diagramming/modeling would be sufficient for this level? Domain model, class diagram, etc?
I'm not using diagrams at all (except for sketches of the UI). By structuring the code, and refactoring, I'm able to know/remember/rediscover/decide which software components implement what functionality.
It seems that when I leave the project
for some time and come back, it is
extremely hard to get back into the
rhythm of what I was doing.
You need to comment your code more. If you leave the code, come back in two weeks, and can't remember how the code works, you need more comments.
If I know the requirements (at this
current time), do I record them
anyways?
Yes, for the same reasons stated above.
how do I manage these requirements?
A feature list is OK, provided you have enough detail in each feature to jog your memory.
How does one efficiently appropriate
his/her time to each respective role?
Break down each feature into smaller and smaller tasks, until you feel like you can do each task in a half day or less.
What would be a normal flow of events
that one would follow?
That depends on your development style. In general I would follow a clear but simple architecture, avail yourself of software patterns where practical, and provide adequate unit tests for your code as you go.
What diagramming/modeling would be
sufficient for this level?
Sufficient diagramming/modeling to make the project clear in your head.
What steps, documentation, and other
project related activities are needed
to help bring this project from an
impractical, hobby project to
something more professional?
Other than what I have already mentioned, make sure you have a good source control system and daily backups in place.
Good luck!
If you believe there is a chance that you're going to work on the project for some amount of time, leave it, and then come back to it at a later date...your best bet is to treat the documentation for the project the same as if you were working with a large team.
That means documenting requirements (even if they're from yourself), writing use cases (if functionality is going to be complex, otherwise some other form of documentation could suffice), and some level of UML diagraming (or other domain specific diagram) which could include activity diagrams/class diagrams/etc.
That way, when you leave the project for some amount of time, you can come back to a well documented idea and pick up where you left off.
As a side note, I try to do the majority of those things no matter what...that way if I ever find somebody interested in working on the project with me, I can get them up to speed quickly and get them on board with my ideas.
This is how I work, YMMV:
Keep a spreadsheet for high level of everything - list of your projects, and some top-level items/todos/reminders
Create a "project" folder for each product/project you have or work on, and create a strucuture to contain documentation and code for the project.
Keep a top-level "catch-all" document for each project, in the root of this folder. Keep you ideas, research, notes etc in this doc.
Then if you want to get organized, keep an MS project file (or similar) and plot out timelines for the various steps in each project. This is good for tracking progress on each project and make sure you arent forgetting anything. Basically keeps you honest with yourself.
And if you need to track progress on project work you are doing for clients, I understand Basecamp is a good solution for this. I am currently evaluating it for my own company. See www.basecamphq.com
Even as a solo developer, you should document at least the overall features of your project, and then the requirements for the particular feature you are working to complete, and then maybe produce a short pseudo-code for the functionality you're currently working on.
That way, if you do end up breaking away from that project, you can get back to it and see where you're up to easily enough. It's also pointless getting too far ahead of yourself with details for this same reason.
It's also a neat motivational tool for a solo developer - getting through and ticking things off is a way to show progress - something that you can start to feel you're not making when you're chewing through a couple of thousand lines of code and it seems like you're still miles away from actually having 'module x' completed.
Lastly - with regards to code comments - I at least try and fill out what actions/behaviour a new function should have in an outline, and then write the code in between the comments. Also, it is useful having plain English explanations of why you're branching in an if/else to support the logic in the condition...
I belive that better results in solo development one can achive with appropriate tools support and tasks that compensate lack of ohers people and help to organize working time. Any tool that generate metada with minimal create time cost describing your software is helpful.
VCS and tools for tracking user actity/code changes history - very important is to add good commit messages
mind-mapping tools for storing project related data (e.g. XMind), blacboard is useful too :)
time tracking tools (e.g. Toggl.com)
write a lot of acceptance test and use acceptance testing frameworks
Of course these clues also fits in non solo development :)
As a lone developer, I've found that your time is very expensive. This means that you have to balance sustainability and momentum - even though you are just one guy, you have to do things so that the you six months from now can go back and look at old stuff without wasting time, without spending so much time maintaining the systems that it compromises your flow.
Your question suggests that you are thinking in terms of fairly heavyweight tools and processes, but the 80/20 rule applies - for example, you can nail documentation well enough by TDD, using the doc tools of your platform to generate API docs, plus a Wiki for specs, lists, etc.
In that vein, I would suggest that you choose your platform carefully. The question about modelling suggests that you are using a platform that produce a lot of code and artifacts, but you may be able to get most of the functionality for much less management overhead elsewhere. Today I'm working on a .NET Web app that I wrote "the right way", but now realize that I could have delivered the same functionality much more efficiently in this case by using PHP with a PHP MVC framework to keep a clean structure.
Specific tools that I'd recommend:
A distributed version control system (much less overhead than centralized)
The most lightweight platform that you can use that has good tooling
A Wiki to easily capture and maintain small and large bits of content
Whatever testing framework that you can use, right from the start of the project
A lightweight TODO list system that you can access from anywhere
I used to work on a very small team (one dba and one C# developer). Even then I found it very useful to have written requirements, formal tests, source control and bug tracking (we used bug tracking for our features as well as bugs). It helped us to not forget anything and a year later when you were doing maintenance, you had something to research though to help you undersatnd what you did. Plus when the two of us left (as most people eventually move on) there was documentation there for the next person.
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Perhaps the most obvious way of protecting a company's intellectual property from its own developers seems to be an NDA - Non Disclosure Agreement. Effectiveness of this approach may vary, depending on many factors, and sometimes or somewhere it may not work as expected.
What other approaches, apart from this purely legal one, exist for protecting software code from the people who develop it? Do they exist at all? Does it make sense in practice?
Maybe, for example, Team Edition of Visual Studio already contains some features related to this problem (for example, levels of access to parts of code, depending of role inside a development team or something like that)?
Reference on the topic:
As statistics says, on average, programmers tend to change their job every three - four years.
Try to build a team you can trust.
The first approach is to force programmers to only know interfaces of other components, so that each one can only steal a small part of the whole software. This approach can be borrowed from footwear production. One transnational corporation, to prevent stealing by employees, arranged its factories so that each factory produced only left or only right shoes. You could do the same with your code: some programmers only write lines with odd numbers, and the others--those with even numbers; provided that they can't see the work of each other! That's sometimes referred to as "pair programming".
Some organizations force employees to sign a non-compete agreement. That's the kind of agreement that prevents programmers to work for competitors. This technique is best combined with job postings like "Looking for senior programmer with 5 years of experience in the similar field".
To prevent your programmers from stealing, you can do harm to them as soon as they finish the software. The method proved itself as the most efficient, and has been used for centuries. For example, Russian Tzar Ivan The Terrible burned eyes of the architect that designed a beautiful church at the Red Square, so the one designed remains the most beautiful ever. You can do something like this to your architect. I heard, latest Visual Studio contains some features...
Nowadays, however, it's more humanistic to hire already blind and already dumb people that lost their hands, so that they can't look at your code to memorize it, can't tell anyone about your code and can't type it again. The advantage is that this will help you dealing with labor agency in your country, which watches for balance that your employees are not discriminated.
And yes, this post is a sarcastic joke, which criticizes the idea of any code-stealing-prevention measures. Sorry, couldn't help posting it.
How do you protect a power plant from sabotage by an employee? How do you prevent a boxer from throwing the fight? How do you prevent a brothel from distributing the clap?
Your concern, while valid, is one that can only be properly addressed by personal responsibility and accountability within your team. Any options you employ to secure the code against theft is likely do more harm than good. If you feel a team member is not trustworthy, get rid of them.
If really necessary you can split the application in subapplications.
Each team works in a single application and sees all others as "black boxes". Maybe SOA helps here.
It's highly unlikely that your code is the real intellectual property - that is your company's business knowledge and process.
SVN has the ability to limit different users to different folders, so you could split your code up into seperate libraries, and allow only certain people Read / Write access.
The file for this is under conf\authz
Here is a sample
[aliases]
# joe = /C=XZ/ST=Dessert/L=Snake City/O=Snake Oil, Ltd./OU=Research Institute/CN=Joe Average
[groups]
# harry_and_sally = harry,sally
# harry_sally_and_joe = harry,sally,&joe
[/
# [/foo/bar]
# harry = rw
# &joe = r
# * =
# [repository:/baz/fuz]
# #harry_and_sally = rw
# * = r
Some documentation can be found here
Under 'Per-directory access control'
Either build a team of developers that you can trust, or entirely lock their system down so they can't access the USB ports, the CD drive, or web mail clients. The only thing they could do is work on the code and possibly browse the web. Also only give them access to the code that they are in charge of.
But with all these security measures chances are your developers will hate working with you and quit their job
There's no straightforward way to do this if your code is within the same project (i.e. you want to allow access to some parts of the code and not others). However, if you have seperate projects that require different security levels, it's possible to allow developers to only have code access to certain projects, and then pull builds from a common build server.
Keep in mind that decompiling of frameworks that work against IL like .NET is relatively straightforward, so preventing access to the code files is not necessarily a silver bullet to protect IP.
I know you said aside from the purely legal one, but I'd just like to add that in addition to the legal one you mentioned, there is also the Non-Compete. Basically says that once you leave your job, you won't be able to compete in any way against your former employer. Stealing code is not as appealing if you won't be able to put it to use for a year or two.
You could make them develop a module that would be seperate from the rest of the application. If you had a plugin/module type system going this would suit well. You could release APIs for the developers to develop against and have them integrate with your DLLs and not the source code.
People seem to be very critical of this but there are legitimate reasons for doing this i.e. partnering with a potential competitor if you gave them all your source you would be shooting yourself in the foot.
It might be worthwhile to spend some brain cell activity on the business model you want to follow. If the core value is embodied in the code, the core value can be stolen by stealing the code. If, however, the core value of your business is embodied in a group of employees, some of them engineers, others sales people, yet others customer support people, and when the software is only the net that keeps these peoples business going, then there's no easy way of stealing the value of your business. And if the software does get stolen, the thieves won't be able to make much use of it.
So, in addition to what cherouvim said, build a team that you can not just trust, but a team that is the core value of your business.
Develop your software in modules.
Have one common module that contains objects that pass back and forth, and utility classes that act on those objects.
Have each group build modules on top of that, without much need to know about other modules.
Have one trusted team of developers do the planning of what goes in each module, and have that team also do the integration of all of the modules into the whole.
Also have a lot of trust in whoever runs your version control server. While it's stable, no one developer can do all that much harm; they can't delete everything, for example, and you'll know exactly what they did and when if that ever becomes an issue.
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Let's say you work for a huge company which suddenly decides to do custom in-house software development. Additionally, they want to be able to offer successful developments to their customers as well (if any).
Now you are in charge of it.
What would you see as most important to build a successful software development infrastructure?
flexible to future growth
flexible on used technologies (projects with c, java, .net, web, mobile, ...)
What kind of tools (source control, forge, ...), hardware (virtual, seperate dev & production, ..), processes (guidelines, code reviews, ...), etc.
UPDATE: Please don't answer that you need the right people and the right tools. This is exactly what i am looking for.. What are the right tools and what people of what type would you hire first to join your team? Think of it as you will be the lead of that development.
Set yourself up to pass the Joel Test with at least a score of 10.
I think having the right people is going to be the most important. Nothing else will matter if your programmers stink.
Someone in charge who knows what they're doing.
Obviously, there are lots of factors, but here are the ones I'd say are crucial:
Hire smart people (and pay them what they're worth)
Select good tools appropriate for the kind of development (don't go for cheap tools)
Establish version control system and policies
Establish testing mechanisms and policies
Don't be afraid to outsource the stuff you don't know how to do
Get the best people for the job. If they aren't willing to pay for the best available, or give you a hard time over your personnel budget, you're off to a bad start.
Get the right tools for the job... software, hardware, support contracts from your vendors, etc.
Establish procedure early on for your development life cycle, and make sure that you have the people in place to make use of it. This is everything from how you evaluate Opportunity Assessments to Development, Testing, and post-production support. Make sure you have the people and the tools for each part of the life cycle.
Dont try to be flexible in technologies. First start by focusing on one technology (Java, .NET, whatever...) and then move to other if you need to. You will be able to solve problems using any technologies, but it is very hard to find people good in many technologies.
At the infrastructure level, Source Control is a must. Continuous integration is a plus. Take time to put in place a standard project layout that you will be able to evolve. It make it easier for developers to switch projects. Take time to put in place a good build process (Ant, Maven, in the Java world). Integrate your build process with your IDE so that developers dont have to wait 5 minutes to deploy their project every time they want to test a code change.
I agree with Guillaume: If you want to build a department from scratch, you need to focus. You need to build your team, have everybody grow into their new responsibilities, get to know each other etc. Trying to go into too many directions at once is the direction towards failure.
So, identify the technology you want to develop in. Since the primary goal in your example is in-house development, the in-house requirements will determine your decision. Build your team with that primary goal in mind.
For in-house development, you need at least two people who already know the company and its processes. (Two because one will definitely be ill or on holidays when the first major crisis hits you). On the other hand you need some outsiders, who are not entrenched by the "we have always done it like this" mindset, who can think out of the box. Those should also be at least two people, for the reason stated above. Your job as the team leader is to balance those two groups and integrate them into a team.
For future growth, always think in terms of organic growth.
Do not increase the team size by 200 %, hire one new guy here and another guy (or gal) there. Slowly build your team.
When you take on a new project, always think of expanding your teams expertise. Try something new with every project. That can be a new source repository, an automated daily build process, a new system to write specifications or documentation, or even a different technology (for example Java when you usually develop in .Net, Delphi or C++). Just make certain you never try to make a big leap in an important project. (I once worked for a company who decided to switch from VB 6.0 to .Net for the biggest project they had ever attempted before. They survived. Barely.)
That way your department will slowly but constantly expand its capabilities. Then when the opportunity presents itself to do development for an external customer, you will already have accumulated most of the knowledge you need in order to pull it off.
Oh yes, and smacl is right, too: You need solid QA/QM if you want your department to survive long term.
Start laying out (and follwing) your QA rules from day one. Keep them as short and flexible as possible. Add what you discover to be missing, and throw out what proves to be unnecessary or impractical.
Not sure this is what you wanted to know, but I felt the need to say it ;-)
Develop a strong QA strategy, including acceptance criteria and change control. Preferably keeping it lightweight to suit internal clients. In addition understand how to carry out requirements analysis, expectation management, and resource management.
Put another way, don't just wing it to create crappy solutions that waste more time than they save and are impossible to maintain. Take time to think about what you want and need, how you can achieve it, and what it is going to cost.
I will offer an answer more focused specifically on coding and the developers / architects role in addition to the previous answers on teams, version control, qa etc. which are of course all important.
Many of your decision is very dependant on your specific business and software structure (a single product code base, SOA, many projects etc.) But in general you should always spend significant time up front developing Core Software Infrastrcuture that will pay huge dividends during the SDLC.
Software infrastruture
Coding Naming Conventions Exception
Handling strategies Logging
Strategies Settings and Configuration
Base classes and Helper Classes
General Architecture and Layers
(Presentation, Facade, Domain
Entities, Data Stores etc.)
Design Tools such as UML 2.0
Requirements
Management / End user interaction
There are tons more, but these are certainly some basics to think about. All of the successful projects I have been involved with incorporated decent software infrastructure. I will also note that many of the project that fail have a common theme... lack of a common infrastructure in place. In most cases these failed projects are lead by a non-technical person that think they can simply throw a bunch of ideas at a few programmers and expect them to deliver in a few weeks.
Bottom line, you need to invest some up front planning and prototyping to ensure success in the long term!
Good luck.
Raiford
www.blacksaber.com
The first persons you should hire should be experienced senior level professionals. Then build up from them / with their input. Add the junior people later.
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What prompts my question is this post from Jeff Atwood, and this post from Dare Obasanjo. It seems to me that there might be at least a few areas where third-party functionality is a better idea than custom code.
For example, should logging always be third-party? How about encryption? Or search?
I'm looking forward to everyone's feedback on this.
Edit: This question assumes that logging, encryption, and/or search isn't your core business.
Encryption should be third party most of the times, ...unless you're in the business of selling encryption systems.
Which is pretty much Mr. Atwood his point as I understood it, your core busines shouldn't be third party, so there's probably nothing that should always be third party...
My rule of thumb is to use (or at least consider) third-party for anything that's outside the core purpose of your business.
Encryption's always been the prototypical example of this. But it extends to other areas as well.
Writing logging code for troubleshooting during development is entirely different than writing logging code used for monitoring production systems.
It's all about choosing which areas of development actually add value to your project. Using third-party stuff removes the risk that that component is incomplete/buggy/etc. but comes with the risk that it may not be as flexible as what you need.
Another example would be developing an entire web forum for a website, when you can buy a solution for much cheaper.
"What functionality should always be third-party?"
None. there is always an exception or special case to overrule the egregious use of "always" when discussing an essentially engineering decision.
Further, the decision to go third party should almost never be made on basis of a given "functionality." There is no such thing as such a perfect library that you never need go anywhere else for that type of functionality.
Going third party is a decision that should be made based on
Cost of going third party vs cost of doing it in house
Development time required placed against deadlines (ie, it might be cheaper inhouse, but your development timeline might not allow it regardless)
Ease of integration, debugging, maintenance, upgrade paths - it may be that you can develop something that will "do the job, but barely" inhouse vs not much more money for something that will take care of you for years to come
Ease/cost of testing and proving - security packages are notoriously difficult to test well
However. There are some things where it's really tough to believe that going in house is better. For instance, you can write a competitor to OpenGL and DirectX, and in certain applications (scientific computing, etc) there are good reasons for considering such a path. But in general you wouldn't dream of it. Even though it's "free" it's still a third party dependency, and you could end up on the skids because of a bug which only affects how you use these graphics languages.
In other words, some incredibly complex or hard to prove/test things exist which should almost always go to a third party. Security is another one. Don't write your own hashing algorithm unless you are 1) certifiably crazy and 2) have at least 3 excellent business reasons to do so.
But "What functionality should always be third-party?" None. There's always an exception.
-Adam
I fully agree that encryption should only be done by experts whenever possible. It should also be open source and have undergone a good deal of peer review.
It depends. Is there a 3rd party library available that suits your needs and most importantly, the language and/or API you work with. Then go for it.
If you have reasons to do your own version, make sure it's not just "not invented here". Also, if you haven't had an in depth look at the market's top five leading products for whatever you need, you haven't done your job thoroughly enough. There are good chances you will find what you are looking for, and even if you can't use it, you still learn something even from the library descriptions. At the minimum you will learn which features you would need and which you don't. If you also get the source code to one of the libraries, this should be your preferred choice over a competing library with no source code but possibly more features.
The area where I have consistently used third party controls was charting. It is a fairly common problem to have to chart some batch of data and the third party controls are mature and trustworthy.
I guess the answer depends upon the usage. If you are developing for profit, you would be likely to buy in components if the cost of using the component vs the cost of developing it results in more profit. This is particularly the case with large components when you do not have the in-house expertise to produce them.
A couple of good examples that I have used are the Infragistics controls and Dundas charts. Although we could have created these in-house, the costs in terms of time and lost opportunity would be huge compared to buying a couple of licenses.
Of course, sometimes we do this type of thing without even considering it as a component purchase. Streching the imagination a little, you could include the .NET framework, SQL Server, the Windows API, etc.
If you can buy it cheaper than you can build it, and the bought functionality meets your business requirements, then buy it.
There is not a definitive answer to this question because just like anything else in software development it depends on the situation. I would say that if the following 3 items are true than you shouldn't think about doing it yourself...
If it's not core to your business or expertise.
If someone else has written it for you and it is being used in widespread communities.
If it meets your needs and requirements or it can be extended to meet your requirements fairly easily.
This question is the inverse of the question: what software should you create?
Which is obviously silly.
For both there is no one answer, it depends on the needs of your business. Do you need to build a better search engine for the entire internet? Almost certainly not. But if you are Google in the late 90s, you do. 3rd vs. 1st party is just a matter of which office you work in, every 3rd party is a 1st party to themselves.
If all you need is good enough: use something off the shelf.
Either you'll create something lower quality or you'll waste money and effort on something that doesn't matter that much, or both.
If it's the foundation of your business: build it yourself.
If you can build something better, and you can build a business out of that better thing, then do!
Don't forget that the time is a big issue for writing all things by your hand, it is not that you cannot do that but the problem comes from your customers or company they always want to find the fastest way to build their system. But if you have a non-profit project you can try building things by yourself. For e.g you can use JQuery or Dojo as your ajax toolkit if you are writing web applications and you want to set some ajax functionality, it will take time to build those things by your hand :)
But you also must be careful when using a third-party libraries, you must trust them because they can contain malicious code, or they are very poorly written and can cause you headache.
Your own encryption function? dont even think about it but I think you probably meant some kind of wrapper for existing functions.
3rd party component advantages:
Alot of functionality
Fully tested (hopefully!)
Doesnt take time to develop so can be cheaper (but..)
Disadvantages
Is it really flexible enough for that next akward customer requirement
Distribution can be expensive
Ties you into 3rd party company which can be a pain when they make a new release to fix bugs
You dont learn to do the task yourself
Whether you use a third party component is going to depend on your application and the requirements. Something like graphing is going to take ages to get right so would be a good third party component to use.
Anything that is outside your core business is a good candidate for third party solutions. You want to spend your development time creating that core functionality that is unique(ish) and can not be purchased and used in a cost effective manor.
For example, lets look at web gridview control. Can you develop and extend a gridview yourself? Sure you can, but to develop, code, and test you grid view is going to take X amount of time and resources, which you can translate in to dollars. Now you have factor in reoccurring costs for support, maintenance, and bug fixes.
Now lets use the arbitrary amount I remember reading in some mag about the average US developer making $40 per hour including their benefits. There are whole web control suites available for around another approximated $800 per developer license. If your developer spends more than say 25 hours total on this one control, you could have purchased a whole suite and spent 5 hours integrating and testing.
Now hopefully I didn't get too confusing there, but the general gist is if you can buy it off the self it will probably save time and money, and instead focus on things you can't get off the self which are usually your money makers.
I'd say for writing boiler plate code, or redundant code which is copy and paste almost every time should be done through a library. For me, validation code almost always has me making stupid mistakes, because it's boring. Spring.NET is amazing for this. I'm so glad my boss encouraged me to try it.
seems you have all the answers you need, but i would just like to throw my opinion in here along with everyone else's. clients pay you to make applications that work specifically for them, and that's usually why they go to you; something they need isn't found in any other product on the market. thus, your focus should be on developing that specific part they need.
undoubtedly your application will need to do other things as well. maybe it will need to connect to a database, or encrypt certain lines. this is where third-party libraries come into play. you don't want to waste time writing a new driver for a database, or a new encryption scheme that might have holes you don't have time to test. you want to use the ones that already exist, and have been extensively tested and optimized.
remember, the faster you finish, the less they will have to pay. this makes them happy and want to come back to you. this also means you make more because even though they pay less, you can work on more projects, which means more money.
in conclusion, you should rely on third-party libraries in miscellaneous modules.