Review goals-goals

What are the goals of our software development? The thinking about goals in the book has also led me to think a lot. Yes, what are our R & D goals? Faster R & D efficiency? Higher quality? More dazzling features? More functions? Better capability improvement? Does the company support so many R & D personnel? So what is our goal?

 

The answer I can get is to make money and make profits. No matter what you use to express it, the ultimate goal of the company is inseparable from this. Companies without funds cannot survive in the end, whether it's a great apple or Google, the profit assessment will never be able to escape. The objective book provides three metrics: throughput, inventory, and operational expense ).

 

Effective production: the speed at which the entire system gets money through sales. Inventory: the money invested by the entire system in procurement, and the money we purchase is what we intend to sell. Operating costs: the amount the system spends to convert inventory into effective output.

 

Effective production is the speed at which money is obtained through sales. For our software products, this is the product's popularity and delivery speed. For us, we need to quickly developMarket NeedsAnd can be quickly delivered to get back the cost. All goals are to improve the effective output, which hinders the effective output or is irrelevant to the effective output. In fact, they all need to be adjusted. According to this definition, many of them can be defined as invalid outputs, such as features not required by the customer, products not required, products that miss the best sales period, and complicated delivery, of course, there are still some differences between manufacturing parts and software, that is, every manufacturing part requires time and cost, but once the software is manufactured, the remaining cost will be basically zero. However, the software must be updated. Therefore, each software version can be considered as a manufacturing component. If so, there are many similarities between the two.

 

Inventory is the money invested by the entire system in procurement. In terms of software R & D, the demand process, R & D process, testing process, and listing process are inventories. The higher the inventory cost, profits will become thinner, and how to reduce inventory is a key indicator. The shortening of various cycles, reducing the number of products in process, and making products sold out faster are all considerations. In addition, the other way to reduce inventory is not to generate inventory, that is, to reduce unnecessary inventory, unnecessary functions, and unnecessary products, products that are gradually eliminated are also the scope of consideration.

 

Operating costs are a series of actions that the system spends to convert inventory into effective output and to implementation, marketing, pre-sales, advertising, and so on in our software R & D, these are the places where costs are located. Of course, this part needs to be considered to be more effective and reasonable.

 

When talking about the above three indicators, we also mentioned another concept "local benefits", which should be focused on the overall architecture and organization, rather than simply considering local benefits, I think this is also the finishing touch of the above three points, or the starting point of the above three points. If you do not consider the overall architecture, local benefits will lead to a reduction in overall benefits. For example, in terms of efficiency, the R & D department only focuses on the number of released products, and does not consider whether it meets market requirements. The result is that a large number of products cannot be sold. The Planning Department only considers the planning indicators, so a large number of demand plans will be created. R & D fails to be implemented due to capacity issues and is shelved. These are a waste of costs. If you convert these costs into other effective outputs, it will produce greater benefits. R & D personnel can release their spare time to support project delivery. The pre-sales support for the spare time of the Planning Department will produce different results.

 

From the agile point of view, it is also the core idea of agile to effectively produce and reduce inventory. Each time we only develop the most urgent and important functions, we can deliver them at any time. In addition, devops is also the idea of agile advocacy. Development (software engineering), technical operation and quality assurance (QA) are integrated to solve the problem, rather than being considered by individual departments.