Edge of Chaos

I’m reading books on TRIZ and becoming enthusiastic about  its potential  for software development industry. Yes, it is not clear how to apply it directly, since TRIZ focuses on technical systems, but I believe we can apply general rules and even have solution patterns in the future.

TRIZ has several patterns of evolution. Here are my thoughts about the most interesting patterns and their applicability to software development.

Evolution toward Increased Ideality

Every system generates both useful effects and harmful effects and every system has costs.

Ideality = Benefits/(Cost + Harm)

Software system is not an exception. If we take a project management software, it helps us stay on track,  plan work and see progress. What is the cost? Well, it takes time to add data into the system. It takes time to find useful information. So the system wastes our time. An Ideal Project Management Software (I use big letters to stress its ideality) will add data from various sources fast and provide all information we need in 2-3 clicks.

The other hidden costs? A learning curve is often significant. Migration to other project management software is not easy and painful. Customization sometimes impossible or very expensive. All that should be (and will be) resolved in the future.

Technology Lifecycle

Each new technology follows a S-curve pattern. Slow early adoption, sharp growth with mainstream adoption and finally slow growth to a full saturation.

source: An Introduction to TRIZ

In software development there are plenty of examples. OOP went mainstream years ago and it is not sexy anymore. REST services grows sharply, mobile industry grows sharply, Agile adoption is mainstream now. It is more intresting what is cooking in early adoption phase right now, what will change the future of software development. Is it TRIZ and problem solving techniques? Is it Continuous Delivery? I don’t know, but we’d better keep our eyes wide open and discover trends as early as possible to ride the wave.

Uneven Development of System Parts

“A system encompasses different parts, which will evolve differently, leading to the new contradictions.” Every software system has various parts such as modules, layers and components. If you think about that, you will remember many cases when one part of a system was improved significantly, while other parts of the system stayed as is. Very often this significant improvement leads to new, unexpected innovations and total re-work of existing modules.

Let me provide an example from TargetProcess. We decided to re-write plugins. We were not satisfied with the existing architecture and we were going to find a more efficient approach. We stopped by ServiceBus pattern and implemented the solution. However, then we faced a new problem: how to create UI for new plugins. It was solved via Mashups and it was totally unexpected from the beginning. Now Mashups are a part of TargetProcess and people can do very interesting things via Mashups.

Very often a new module design brings along major changes in system architecture. We decided to re-design Views, and new Javascript architecture evolved (tau js framework). All areas of TargetProcess will be based on this new tau framework as a result. It’s amazing how often this law is actually observed in software development.

Increased Complexity then Simplification (Reduction)

That is my favorite maybe. “There is a tendency for systems to add functions that at first increase complexity but over time collapse into simpler systems that provide the same, or more, functionality.” It is so common for a software system to become more complex, to add new features, more features. There is even a term for that,  coined years ago: bloatware. This law clearly advises the natural path of evolution, and Simplification phase is crucial. However, usually simplification never happens and software product dies.

source: Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak

I can clearly see this pattern in TargetProcess as well. Initially it was a pretty simple product with a few features. It grew into a quite complex yet powerful agile project management software with many integrations and customization options. In worst times we had about 100 different screens in the system. Everything could be done differently and somethimes you had to visit several screens to complete a single action .

We started Reduction phase last year. We are re-working all the functionality and we have a clear vision on how to shrink all the complexity into 10 screens or even less. It is really cool to see the way and to follow it. It is fun and you have a genuine feeling of the “right way”. We fearlessly removed features that are almost not used, yes. But interestingly enough, new, fewer screens will provide even more functionality than the old ones.

I believe this is the path all software systems should follow. More complexity, more functionality, then Simplification and Reduction.

What is the recipe of a successful company? How to become an expert in any discipline? People are struggling to get answers to these questions. We have thousands of books full of business advice. We have terabytes of information on any subject. (I believe 80% of information is pretty useless. It contains no real value, just a compilation of other sources.) OK, back to the topic.

Skills

I am reading a very interesting book (in fact it is a list of research papers)  Nature of Expertise. This research is dedicated to human expertise. What is the difference between an expert and a novice? How can we train novices to become experts faster? The general notion about expertise is that it takes about 10,000 hours (~10 years) to become an expert in a complex discipline like programming, chess etc. Yes, there are exceptions, but you have to spend ~10 years on average to become a great software developer.

I’ve contemplated that for over several weeks and tend to think that this is nearly true. Only now I really feel I can do something significant. I wanted this 5 years ago, but obviously was not ready enough. I lacked some skills such as User Experience and Leadership. I was quite bad as a CEO, but improved a lot over the last years.

Success

An even more interesting question is whether we can apply the same rule to companies. It seems we can. If it takes 10 years for a person to become an expert, it seems it takes about 5 years for a company to find its way. It means that on average a company is struggling for the first 5 years, gains some experience and is then capable of doing something significant. Let’s take some random examples. I’m not picking companies that meet the criteria above, just some companies I know and for which I was able to find history records:

OK, it seems there are 2 groups of companies: some of them are really quick and did something cool right from the start. Some of the companies follow the 5-years rule. Also, it seems that fresh startups are more apt to succeed quicker. Does it mean that the years-to-success number is decreasing? Maybe. It will be compelling to verify this tendency. It can also mean that years-to-failure is decreasing as well.

There is a very interesting data about 100 largest publicly traded software companies that shows how fast they hit $50m revenue.

There are 3 groups of companies: Rocket Ships ($50m in 6 years or less), Hot companies ($50m in 12 years or less) and Slow Burners. On average, 8 years is required to have $50m revenue. I believe it is somewhat consistent with the 5-years milestone. Obviously, it takes time to grow when you have created something cool. Usually it is not an immediate effect.

Rocket Ships

I think it takes a good deal of time to research many companies, identify their first key milestones and find out typical patterns. There are so many factors like company size, management style, environmental changes etc. Still it will be very cool research to do and I believe it will be possible to evaluate companies based on its results.

Does the “10-5 law” exist? I don’t know. But. If you can’t master something in 10 years, maybe you should focus on something else. If you can’t do something great as a company in 5-6 years, maybe you should change your business goal.

Editor: Olga Kouzina