Developer behavior Part 1
by
Charlie Bess
I was in a discussion the other day at EDS with Greg Papadopoulos, and he said something I'd never really thought about quite that way before:
“Developers don't buy things, they join things."
That is part of the explanation for the open source movement. Software developers are in the creation business. They'll use something if other people they know are using it, otherwise they'd rather create it.
That's part of what crossing the chasm is all about in Geoffrey Moore's books. You need to have the early adopters market your product in order to get a foothold.
It does make me wonder about the whole SOA approach though. One of the issues about OO development was that we never got the planned reuse (it was harder to find it than to write it). Could SOA run into that same kind of issue because of the lack of "joining" for the developers. Do they need to incorporate the services as well as the concepts into their practices?
When I think of the SAP phenomenon, it did not require a great deal of developer involvement. If done "right," it didn't require a great deal of development. The same could be said about Business Process Outsourcing. That can't be said about SOA though.
