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1.4 Drucker’s Challenge

Deﬁning software development as knowledge work doesn’t allow us to ignore

the issue of productivity. Productivity and quality are still very important to the

success of a business venture. The management guru Peter Drucker forecast the

emergence of this issue as long ago as 1969:

‘‘Knowledge work is not easily deﬁned in quantitative terms, ... To make

knowledge work productive will be the great management task of this

century, just as to make manual work productive was the great management

task of the last century.’’

Peter Drucker (1969)

How you measure productivity in software development is a good question.

It is most certainly not lines of code, function points or hours worked. Still, no

matter how difﬁcult it is to measure, we are producing something and we can

always improve productivity and quality. Perhaps we just have to live with this

ambiguity.

Any attempts to quantify software development productivity must make

allowance for the multiple results of such work. In developing a piece of

software we create a deliverable executable, but there are by-products. The

developers themselves increase their stock of knowledge – about their tools,

about the subject of the software and about the creation process. Similarly,

managers, users and others involved with the speciﬁcation, implementation

and delivery of the software will learn as a by-product.

Despite the problems of measuring productivity, we can still discuss the

issues, and we can still ask how we can address Peter Drucker’s challenge.

Much of this book is directed at addressing this challenge: How can we make

software developers more productive?

The Agile and Lean schools give us the methods to increase developer

productivity, but we still need to apply them. The challenge we face is less

What can we do to be more productive?  and more How can we move from

here to there – from where we are today to more productive practices? and

How can we continue to improve our productivity?

In other words: How do we change? How do we continue to change? How do we go

beyond our current stock of knowledge?

1.5 The Prototype of Future Knowledge Workers

Highlighting IT workers as knowledge workers allows us to learn from the

existing body of knowledge on th e subject. IT workers are not alone; they

are knowledge workers and there’s much to learn from other knowledge

workers, and from research and l iterature about knowledge work in

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