The author of this website is
Don Wells. He learned about how teams become unproductive while at
Honeywell and General Electric. He then learned a great deal about
teams becoming super productive while building expert diagnostic
systems for the US Army and Ford Motor Co. Many artificial intelligence
practices are now common in software development.
The turning
point in current software development came in the mid 1990s. Many
people were re-examining the idea that software must be built like
hardware.
Jeff Sutherland
and
Ken
Schwaber were formalizing a new process called
SCRUM. Alistair Cockburn was
working on
Crystal Clear. Chrysler was doing
its part by trying to build traditional business systems using object
oriented technology. This is a common approach now that Java is used in
almost all domains, but was very advanced in the previous millennia.
Don was
hired on to the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation (C3) project as an
expert in object technology and GUIs. It didn’t take long for him to
spot some serious trouble. The team was
splintered into 3 groups
that worked in competition
instead of cooperation. The project was becoming overdue. Estimates
were showing it way over budget.
It was
also way too
complex and
riddled with redundant code (
Conway’s
Law) to ever work reliably in production.
His assessment of
the