In 1999 I began co-authoring magazine articles for Rose Architect, a small magazine that talked about all things Rational Rose. This quickly grew into writing for several different trade magazines and publications. The main topic of the articles focused on software development tools and processes. After about 50 articles, my friend and co-writer, Christian Buckley and I decided we should put these together in a book. What an endeavor!
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Now that we had a real publisher, we had to fit our writing style into their templates so their printer could automatically take the book and print it in their standard sizes, standard fonts, and font sizes. It took us sometime to learn the new template format and since much of our content was written in a different format, it had to be converted. Looking back we probably spent about 1/3 of our time formatting this book into this well defined standard from the publisher.
Within months of our book hitting stores, Addison-Wesley commissioned us to write a third book. This time on another tool from IBM-Rational. The tool was ClearQuest. There wasn’t a book out there yet on the tool and they liked the perspective we used in our other books. I had used the tool before, but was not an expert. By the end of writing the book, I would be.
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So what does this have to do with anything? I found it interesting that the final product was the same, a book. But the effort and time I spent on the actual content of the book compared to the formatting and style of the book overtime decreased and the quality of the book increased. My focus in the last book was the content. All of my creative energy was spent on the things that mattered, the content not the format, font size or color of the book.
I have found in my career when there is a well defined coding standard, development process, and tool chain, software engineers produce higher quality code in a more predictable manner. Their creative energy is focused on delivering the product not on the process of delivering the product. When teams have an ad-hoc coding standard, process and tools, the engineers tend to spend valuable time figuring out trivial things like: where to indent their code or what tool to use to share their code with their team.
Just my random thoughts.
DWP