There’s a cute adage about World War 4. “I don’t know what weapons World War 3 will be fought with, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones”

Here’s my cute adage, only about [any software development project]:

I don’t know what you will be working on 10 years from now, but I do know what you won’t be working on – the project you are doing now. Because the project you are doing now will probably be abandoned or jettisoned, just like almost every software project.

How To Keep Your Software Development Process Relevant Over Time

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If you are a brilliant developer, what determines your success in the world?

Is it your raw talent?

Or is it the choices you make about which technologies to use?

Any reasonable observer with experience in software development might quickly conclude that SMOSLT is over-reach.

It is simply not reasonable to expect that a user would accept the inadequacies of the tooling, and invest the time necessary for such a dubious result. After all, scheduling is already a shot in the dark. Adding this layer on top of it only makes the process more prone to error. So goes this line of thinking. And it’s not wrong, either.

Paralysis by Analysis?

Then there is the issue of time. Resources spent on front end analytics only subtract from the resources available to develop the software itself.

Much better to simply make a commitment to a known path, than waste away the hours and days and even weeks figuring out all the could’a would’a should’a factors that one might consider.

Take the 2 Day Challenge

[this only applies when SMOSLT is mature enough to actually pass the 2 Day Challenge]

• Take a couple of days and use SMOSLT against a sample generated schedule that most closely approximates your own.
• Don’t use hundreds of options, just stick with a few dozen.
• Don’t try to get your scoring perfect, accept some approximate scores modestly tailored to fit your own realities
• Don’t try to get the runs perfect, instead just see if you can find any surprising combinations

Here’s what we hope you’ll conclude:

1. Even just a couple surprising options might save you 10x what you invested in the 2 Day Challenge
2. You’ll find yourself much more well versed in some of the options than you were before you started
3. You’ll find yourself thinking in new ways, looking at new metrics, and getting comfortable in ways that you didn’t expect.

This Has To Be Done?

SMOSLT is built for speed, not accuracy.

It is much better to sustain just a little bit of analysis than to avoid glaze over by not doing any analysis at all. Your vendors will probably appreciate it as well. From PAAS vendors to hardware and software vendors, everyone wants a reasonable shot at your business. This allows you to give them just that.

Then, once you select a set of approaches, you also know a little bit more of what is expected from that approach. You might have scored a technology or a vendor one way, and discover later that your scoring was off. But now you know what you expected, it wasn’t just a glaze-over decision. So your attention is properly focused on the objectives at hand.

Goldilocks was hungry.  She tasted the porridge from the first bowl.
“This porridge is too hot!” she exclaimed.
So, she tasted the porridge from the second bowl.
“This porridge is too cold,” she said
So, she tasted the last bowl of porridge.
“Ahhh, this porridge is just right,” she said happily…

The Effect of Getting Options Right:

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