7 Person Year Application Rewritten in 2 Person Months

http://www.metromodemedia.com/blogs/posts/TMeloche2037.aspx

by startupcrazy • 19 years ago

33 43 19 years ago

A lone programmer rewrites an entire project in 2 months. It uses executable specifications. It is thrown away because nobody else understands it. (LISP, YACC. or something else?)

startupcrazy11• 19 years ago

Executable specifications. The new compiler was about 5000 lines of Java. The developer says he can probably reduce most of 3000 lines of it to about 700 productions in YACC. Of course, nobody is interested!

andreyf• 19 years ago

Sounds like a prisoner's dilemma kind of problem... individual firms won't benefit from open sourcing unless everyone open sources.

brlewis• 19 years ago

Not at all. Open sourcing your software not only means you share the benefits, but also the costs:

http://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/cgiemail/buybuild.html

startupcrazy11• 19 years ago

Indeed. All of the Detroit automobile companies are now off shoring to India and China to try to reduce costs. Open sourcing factor floor control and monitoring systems is simply another way to achieve the same results.

mynameishere• 19 years ago

I thought for sure this would mention another "innovation" that came out of Chrysler, "Extreme Programming":

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WasChryslerComprehensiveCompensationS...

Short story: Chrylser had been trying to unify its various systems and subsystems for payroll and had failed and failed. Eventually, a group of consultants were brought in who had invented a particular agile technique, extreme-programming. Of course, the project failed, but that didn't keep the consultants from spreading the XP word throughout the world.

startupcrazy11• 19 years ago

Two of my developers were on the original XP team at Chrysler. They don't to XP at Chrysler anymore either.

ratsbane2• 19 years ago

This sounds familiar. I went through something like this at a Fortune-100 company which I won't name here, except they rejected the solution because it wasn't written in .Net and budgeted around seven figures to rewrite their existing horrible system in .Net. I quit somewhere along the way but I still feel the frustration, pain, and perhaps even anger whenever I think of the stupidity and waste. I hope I never have to go through that again.

axiom4• 19 years ago

He's talking about SCADA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA)

Sounds really impressive. If anyone has ever worked with PLCs you know what a nightmare it is to interface with them and deal with their primitve data types. Not to mention programming them in ladder logic (yeah, most industrial machines are still programmed in ladder logic straight from the 1800s.)

So he's not kidding, this is a BIG deal.

imsteve• 19 years ago

I hate, no I HATE that language...

edw5194• 19 years ago

Actually, this writer's conclusion, open source, is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I believe, and what I think is the premise of this forum.

Mega-institution isn't aware of its own golden needle in its haystack? Good! Another opportunity for a couple of hackers in a spare bedroom.

ratsbane2• 19 years ago

"Good! Another opportunity for a couple of hackers in a spare bedroom."

Right-O.

startupcrazy11• 19 years ago

Agreed. The problem is, hackers don't tend to even have access to this type of problem because you need access to the very real environment of a large factory floor. And, even if you did build a better solution, there are relatively few customers, so selling is really about selling into large corporate bureaucracies, not getting someone to download a cool new plug-in. This type of selling is very expensive, and they will not buy from a couple of hackers in a spare beadroom

Agathos2• 19 years ago

I don't see the opportunity.

It doesn't sound like a hacking problem; it sounds like a sales problem. If your customers are so hidebound they won't even use the software they already have, how will you convince them to pay for, let alone use, yours?

Or are you planning to duplicate that effort and sell it to other manufacturers (who I hope can still act rationally)?

edw5194• 19 years ago

If your solution is so compelling and the demand is there, find better customers.

mpfefferle• 19 years ago

Anyone have any idea what this consultant might have been doing to get this kind of productivity?

SwellJoe4• 19 years ago

As far as I can tell from the article: Magic.

Or, maybe he called it "agile", but I'm not really thinking gymnasts and ballerinas are magically great developers, though they are strikingly agile. This article needs some kind of detail--it doesn't answer most of the W's of good journalism: Who, what, when, where, why, and how. We've only got a really vague what ("a good developer built something that I liked a lot") and a vague where (Chrysler). Somehow all of the good bits are completely left out.

startupcrazy11• 19 years ago

Yes. You have run into the nature of a non-disclosure agreement the big three have everyone sign. You cannot tell the good parts.

startupcrazy11• 19 years ago

Writing two or three very clever grammars.

rwebb4• 19 years ago

Uhh...where does the $50 billion come from again?

axiom4• 19 years ago

Tracking down-time means knowing where your bottlenecks are. If you know your bottlenecks are you can improve cycle time. Improving cycle time by just a few seconds mean massive increases in output.

$50 billion might be a stretch, but it's not far off.

Note: Cycle time is the amount of time it takes to produce a part. It's sort of like the MHz of the manufacturing world. Usually car plants are setup such that there are n manufacturing lines in operation at any given time producing/assembling parts. So you're always at the mercy of the slowest line. It takes months to comission a new line so it's not just a matter of "adding servers" to improve production.

rwebb4• 19 years ago

Thanks. I've read The Goal.

My point is that Chrysler itself was recently sold for less than $10 billion. Maybe Cerberus bought because they knew about this code that was written in a day and now they are going to turn them into a $50 billion dollar software company?

Look out SAP & Oracle...

jemptymethod• 19 years ago

give me 2 months and I could do away with AOP by showing how (comparatively) trivial it is to implement in Lua

almost• 19 years ago

Given enough incompetent developers or bad managers any project can be a "7 Person Year Application".

trekker7• 19 years ago

I was half expecting this to be a story about Lisp.

startupcrazy11• 19 years ago

I was wondering when someone would finally make a comment about Lisp. In fact, this could very easily be a story about Lisp. Using Lisp to create grammars to read and execute specification files. This developer was forced by the client to write entirely in Java, but would probably have used Lex and Yacc, plus Java, if given a choice. I suspect, folks around here could get the exact same results in Lisp. The key is, Lisp programmers have likely been taught to think about the problem in a similar manner. The key is how you think about the problem, not the specific tools you use.

rsheridan6• 19 years ago

How would it benefit Chrysler to open the source? According to this article, their software gives them a competitive advantage. Why would they want to share it with other companies?

7 Person Year Application Rewritten in 2 Person Months

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