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Blog Articles
No Silver Bullet
More than 20 years ago Fred Brooks published a seminal essay on the nature of software, called “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering”. If you’ve never read it I’d highly encourage it, as even though it’s ancient by the standards of our industry, it’s still amazingly relevant and gets to the heart of why creating great software is so hard.
Outsourcing Core Competencies
I work exclusively with commercial software product organizations. Organizations that must create products and services that thousands or millions of users must make an independent decision to use or buy. This is in contrast to custom software companies that create software purely for internal use. But since many companies have moved from custom to product software I often find companies with behaviors and practices inherited from their prior life as a custom software company, but one practice that really deeply bothers me is when I find a product organization that is outsourcing core competencies.