Software Projects for Business People

 Software Projects for Business People, Jonathan P Crosby, Independently Published, 2018

You have just been named to a team tasked with creating a new software package, from scratch. Where do you even start?

Planning is essential before any code is written. Who is the intended recipient? Is it for internal use only, or will it be sold to the public? Constant communication between the corporate side and the IT side is also essential. Imposing an arbitrary deadline on the IT Department to have the software finished will not help.

The author uses the metaphor of building a house to make the whole process easier to understand for non-IT types. While in the planning stage, changes are acceptable (they are practically expected). When construction is half done, changes will cost a lot of time and money. It's tempting to want the software equivalent of a mansion, but it's a bad idea. Instead of having software that does everything but walk and talk by itself, and is full of bugs, what's wrong with having a much more basic piece of software that does only a few things, and has a lot fewer bugs?

Speaking of bugs, quality control is a requirement. Each finished chunk of software must be tested to make sure that it works with every other chunk of software. For example, this is a piece of HR software. Give it to your HR department for a test drive. Have IT people sit and watch how the software is used. Make note of, and fix, anything that doesn't work, or could be done better.

Corporate IT departments have constantly been accused of having their own language, incomprehensible to the rest of us. This book goes a long way toward bringing Corporate and IT closer together. It is very much worth reading for anyone in business, regardless of which side you are on.