There is a call to action reverberating in company boardrooms, earnings calls, technology conferences, and IT departments: every company should be a software company. The call makes intuitive sense. Software, when done right, creates infinite business leverage. It is not a coincidence that 7 out of 10 largest companies in the world are software companies. But how does a company become a software company? This book will? help enterprises transform into a software company.
The software-driven future that Marc Andreessen predicted in his now-famous 2011 essay is here but unevenly distributed. While enterprises, and teams within, grasp the software technologies, they lack the context to leverage them - much less understand the fundamental principles that drive the business value from software: What is the real essence of the software-based transformation? If every enterprise is implementing the same technologies, what is the source
Table of Contents
Introduction
The book is a series of essays exploring 1 or 2 fundamental principles of good software. The first set of essays will cover understanding software technology as a means of producing value. The second set of essays will describe the state-of-the-art process of building software. The third and final set of essays will focus on how people are critical to building great software.
Part I: Means
Software is a soft technology with leverage similar to money and written language . But enterprises are still figuring out how to harness the potential of this new soft technology. Understanding and mastering software as a means of production is critical to succeeding in the age of software.
Chapter 1: Transformation Digital Transformation doesn't come from large and expensive programs to implement newer and better technologies. Instead, the transformation comes from continuously improving at the art of envisioning, building, and shipping software.
Chapter 2: Essence The prevailing hypothesis is that enterprises' inability to build good software is due to a lack of capital. It couldn't be further from the truth. The reason enterprises struggle is because they mismanage the complexity of the software development process.
Chapter 3: Value "Meeting Stakeholder Requirements", a typical approach for enterprise software programs, is a value-destroying mistake. Good software evolves from adaptive designs which resolve ever-changing user problems. Because users don't want more features, users want their "jobs to be done" .
Part II: Process
Enterprise software industry is obsessed with implementing best practice processes to build good software. But these processes become an end unto themselves. Understanding the core principles behind these processes can help enterprises to right-size these processes to what they need.
Chapter 4: Iteration The currency for creating new value is "working software". But it is easier said than done in an enterprise environment. Building and delivering on progressively shorter planning horizons can get them on a path of iterative learning with “working software”.
Chapter 5: Flow A lot of effort in enterprise software goes into managing plans - in estimating effort and deadlines and keeping projects on track. But when value comes from differentiation, the teams must focus on managing the demonstrable flow of value to the users.
Chapter 6: Supply Chain Enterprise processes to procure software are extremely slow. By the time the process completes and technology sees action, it is already obsolete. Instead of one-off procurements, a different approach is a consistent supply chain to rent, buy or reuse undifferentiated software components.
Chapter 7: Agility Enterprises misunderstand Agility. It isn't about building software fast. Instead, it is about leveraging software's fundamental agility and building solutions that can help an enterprise respond to the accelerating pace of change. Part III: People Following best practices on technologies and processes can result in good software. But the transition from good to great happens when teams are assigned problems and are empowered to create the best solutions within an organizational culture that rewards creativity.
Chapter 8: Team Teams build good software, not a collection of resources. Teams develop through long-term shared motivation; from experiencing failures and successes together. When raw material is ideas, like with software, the quality of the team determines the quality of the output.
Chapter 9: Culture Culture eats strategy. Therefore, teams need a medium of good culture to thrive. Because innovation always happens within a creative culture, never within a compliance culture. Rigid processes create compliance but dampen creativity.
Chapter 10: Management Creative culture requires Creative management. You have to equip and empower teams to solve user and customer problems. And an enterprise must model every important solution attribute within the organization structure first.
Epilogue
