Rickerism

A micro-multinational is a company with less than 500 employees with offices in more than two countries. Managing software development in a micro-multinational is not a trivial matter. Without proper tools, a company can burn all of its energy just putting out the fires caused by miscommunication. The proper tools can mean the difference between focusing on winning market share or focusing on keeping the ship afloat.

The open source software development communities such as Apache, Linux and Eclipse work in teams that are as geographically dispersed as possible. As such, they have built many of the tools needed. What they have not built are the specific tools needed for commercial software, namely integration with operations, logistics, sales and marketing.

The figure below shows a conceptual model of the tools that are needed. The top row is the customer relationship management (CRM) system. The middle row are the management tools. The bottom row are the tools specific to software development.

Conceptual model of tool set

All the bottom row tools are available now as best of breed: Bugzilla for tracking, Subversion for version control, Cruise Control for build management, etc. Companies such as Collabnet are integrating the bottom row. Companies such as Rally are working on the middle row. Companies such as SalesForce and Sugar are building the top row. No one seems to be looking at the whole picture.

What is really missing is the ability to see the team. The biggest challenge of a micro-multinational is visibility. Who is who? Who is where? What is what? Who is working on what? For starters, I would like to see photographs of the people in the various offices, what their background is and what projects they are working on. At least from there I would know who to email with a question.

Eric Raymond’s first lesson in open source is, “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” I suppose my need for team visibility qualifies as that personal itch.