Balancing the human and the engineering factors in software development

Improvement of the software development process has been a subject of interest for many years. A lot of work was done between the 1970s and 1980s to try and improve the software development process through the application of the feedback concepts from control engineering into the evolution of software applications. The rationale behind it being that software programs do evolve and that the software development process can be improved by learning from this evolution and that the output of the evolution can be fed back into the program to facilitate learning. What hampered the success of research in this area is that industrial processes are mainly technical while software development is mainly dependent on the human mind for both design and coding. During the past decade a new group of software development methodologies (collectively called Agile methodologies) has since emerged which claims to reduce the failure of software development projects by margins that cannot be ignored. The strengths of these methodologies lie in giving more value to the human factor than the engineering factor in the development of software. This paper analyses the effect of putting more weight on the human factor to the overall control and management of the software development process. We are going to use a case study of one software development company in South Africa that is working on a large non-trivial database system and is not following any laid down methodology. Our analysis revealed that the company's way of developing software is closely aligned to the Agile methodology principles. From this case study it is clear that there is need for a balance between the human factor and the engineering factor in order to avoid possible problems such as poor technical documentation.