Re: Do I Really Need A Supervisor?

[jhopper@erinet.com (jim hopper)]

Its been my experience that people get this kind of managment and
implementation of the SEI process in organizations where the software
engineering staff is to busy to be bothered being part of the process
groups who write the standards and processes.  

At our shop in Dayton at SAIC we run at level 3 (though a number of us
have worked for the last 5 months as part of the team in a primes level
5 program) and i made it a point to be part of the process of defining
our procedures and standards, and to push our other tech people to
particpate as well.  Our engineering procedures were written 100% by
working engineers, not managers.  our Software Development Plans for
projects are written mostly by the development staff who have to
implement them, not by "managers".  Mostly what we did when writing our
plans and procedures is sit down and document how we did business.  We
were pretty much doing the correct thing all along, but by writing it
down and thinking about it we cleaned it up, and made it into something
we can teach new folks etc.  

while we sometimes can do stupid things, and i am the first to rant
about managers (i am a leader NOT a manager to paraphrase a Dilbert
cartoon i like) we have procedures and standards that i consider very
resonable. And most of our software staff feels so as well. Process is
not imposed from above its part of how we do things!

I submit your problem is probably not your management so much, as your
attitude that you are to busy to be bothered with helping to defining
your process.


best jim



In article <3330BE71.695@earthlink.net>
antialias@earthlink.net writes:

> SEI may have some very good ideas about how to develop software.
> Unfortunately, these ideas are implemented my morons who do
> not know how to develop the software they are writing development
> policies for. As I stated, ny work at the moment is to write
> a safety critical device which needs about 15,000 lines of code
> to run on a 68332...an easy job if it weren't for doing things
> "by the process" - which requires us to do things like vax based
> unit testing instead of target based, using tools to measure and
> record metrics which nobody uses, maintaining our code and all the
> related files in an archaic word processing system, using a pretty
> printer which makes my beautifully organized source code into 
> an absolute mess...etc, etc, etc...  our company is having a hard
> time keeping software engineers because of the "process" they
> have to work under...