Developing Effective Software Productively.

It is not uncommon to hear laments about how long it takes to build software systems and how often, once built, those systems fail to meet the needs and desires of users. Given that attention has been paid to how we build large software systems for over fifty years, you might wonder why we have not figured out how to build the systems people want in a reasonable amount of time. To put the problems into perspective, fifty years is half the life-span of a Galapagos turtle and many software systems may be amongst the most complex systems ever built by humans. In that light, perhaps it is not surprising that we have not figured it all out. In this talk, I will explore what productivity means to software developers, how we might track the value that is delivered in software produced by developers and how we might begin to think about measuring the productive delivery of effective software.