Software by Numbers: Low-Risk, High-Return Development

Preface "Absolutely! You must write the book!" Such was the enthusiastic response of my manager, Stu Stern, Vice President of Sun Professional Services, to the idea of a book that would draw on the latest ideas in application development methodologies and apply them primarily for financial rather than technological benefit. For all our efforts and successes in creating development methodologies, only a few practitioners have realized the potential for using these techniques to maximize financial return. And yet financial return is usually the enduring metric of success in software development, at least in the commercial world. This book draws on several years of experience in winning competitive contracts for systems integration and application development projects. Although winning such deals is unquestionably about using innovation to outflank the competition, it's also about getting the money right. The price has to be within the customer's budget, the development cost has to be low enough for the bidder to make a good margin, and the margin has to be justified against the risk. There's nothing new in those ideas; they are true for any competitive procurement. What is different about software development is that we're only just learning to understand value creation. The most common view is that software development incurs risks and costs. Despite this, even the most hardened, risk-averse development house would recognize that software carries implicit value. If that value were not there, no one would pay to have software developed. Unfortunately, all of the creative and business energies of the development organization are normally focused on reducing cost and risk.