If the conventional, closed-source, heavily-managed style of software development is really defended only by a sort of Maginot Line of problems conducive to boredom, then it's going to remain viable in each individual application area for only so long as nobody finds those problems really interesting and nobody else finds any way to route around them. Because the moment there is open-source competition for a `boring' piece of software, customers are going to know that it was finally tackled by someone who chose that problem to solve because of a fascination with the problem itself-which, in software as in other kinds of creative work, is a far more effective motivator than money alone.
Having a conventional management structure solely in order to motivate, then, is probably good tactics but bad strategy; a short-term win, but in the longer term a surer loss.
So far, conventional development management looks like a bad bet now against open source on two points (resource marshalling, organization), and like it's living on borrowed time with respect to a third (motivation). And the poor beleaguered conventional manager is not going to get any succour from the monitoring issue; the strongest argument the open-source community has is that decentralized peer review trumps all the conventional methods for trying to ensure that details don't get slipped.
Can we save defining goals as a justification for the overhead of conventional software project management? Perhaps; but to do so, we'll need good reason to believe that management committees and corporate roadmaps are more successful at defining worthy and widely shared goals than the project leaders and tribal elders who fill the analogous role in the open-source world.
That is on the face of it a pretty hard case to make. And it's not so much the open-source side of the balance (the longevity of Emacs, or Linus Torvalds's ability to mobilize hordes of developers with talk of ``world domination'') that makes it tough. Rather, it's the demonstrated awfulness of conventional mechanisms for defining the goals of software projects.
One of the best-known folk theorems of software engineering is that 60% to 75% of conventional software projects either are never completed or are rejected by their intended users. If that range is anywhere near true (and I've never met a manager of any experience who disputes it) then more projects than not are being aimed at goals that are either (a) not realistically attainable, or (b) just plain wrong.
This, more than any other problem, is the reason that in today's software engineering world the very phrase ``management committee'' is likely to send chills down the hearer's spine-even (or perhaps especially) if the hearer is a manager. The days when only programmers griped about this pattern are long past; Dilbert cartoons hang over executives' desks now.
Our reply, then, to the traditional software development manager, is simple-if the open-source community has really underestimated the value of conventional management, why do so many of you display contempt for your own process?
Once again the example of the open-source community sharpens this question considerably-because we have fun doing what we do. Our creative play has been racking up technical, market-share, and mind-share successes at an astounding rate. We're proving not only that we can do better software, but that joy is an asset.
Two and a half years after the first version of this essay, the most radical thought I can offer to close with is no longer a vision of an open-source-dominated software world; that, after all, looks plausible to a lot of sober people in suits these days.
Rather, I want to suggest what may be a wider lesson about software, (and probably about every kind of creative or professional work). Human beings generally take pleasure in a task when it falls in a sort of optimal-challenge zone; not so easy as to be boring, not too hard to achieve. A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction. Enjoyment predicts efficiency.
Relating to your own work process with fear and loathing (even in the displaced, ironic way suggested by hanging up Dilbert cartoons) should therefore be regarded in itself as a sign that the process has failed. Joy, humor, and playfulness are indeed assets; it was not mainly for the alliteration that I wrote of "happy hordes" above, and it is no mere joke that the Linux mascot is a cuddly, neotenous penguin.
