The Software Development Team as a Market
A Capitalist, Democratic Alternative to Agile, Waterfall, SCRUM and the Spiral Models of Management.
Abstract
The Problem
The Solution (An Alternative)
The Proposition
How does this look like in the real world?
A Plausible Scenario: Describe a plausible scenario involving the gig economy but bounded within the corporate structure
Describe the interactions between business, broker and technical engineers/software developers
Describe the technologies facilitating the interactions between business and developers and the market
Core Principles
Software Development Teams cannot keep up with Market Demands for Advanced Technology: The speed of modern technological advancement and increasing market demand is not matched by the production systems used to deliver software and technology in general and software corporations no matter how agile seem to fall short of producing effective solutions to meet the market demand.
A major contributing factor to this inability is poor resource allocation: This inefficiency is due to the inability of these management systems (Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, Spiral and their practitioners - the businesses that run them) to allocate human and technological resources efficiently in response to market demands.
Yet, highly effective resource management technologies and frameworks exist - yet to be tried: The Free Market, represented by the Capitalist Model is widely acknowledged to be the undisputed most efficient means of resource allocation system in history, yet the principles of this model are not leveraged within organisations to achieve the same level of resource allocation efficiency.
We posit that this means should indeed be leveraged to yield exactly the benefits seen in the global market system.
The Market Place of Ideas is Not Fully Democratised with current Software Development Methodologies:
While the democratic nature of the Capitalist Free Market system is widely acknowledged to yield many benefits in terms of innovation and creative freedom as well as speed of production, this aspect is hardly every leveraged in modern corporate structures even in systems as flexible as Agile or the Spiral Method and certainly not in Waterfall.
We posit that this characteristic of the modern capitalist free market system should indeed be leveraged to yield exactly the benefits seen in the global market system. There is a mismatch between the capabilities of available technology and the ability of IT and Software Development Teams to Leverage it: The capabilities of the information technology of the modern era are far beyond the capabilities of software development teams and methodologies to leverage them effectively. For example, Cloud offers resource allocation flexibility and automation features which most IT companies are unable to exploit to the maximum. Before the cloud era, systems like VMS, SUN Solaris Cluster, AIX, IBM Power-series and other "Mainframe" technologies possessed advanced and highly granular resource management and automation capabilities which remain un-exploited to this day.
New Relationships:
The Business - Software Team Relationship,
The Business - Intermediary - Software Team Complex,
Relationship between Software Development Team Members,
Relationships between Competing Teams.
The Business
The Software Development Team
The "Brokers"/"Middlemen"
The "How": Enabling the Software Development Team Market Model
Enabling Technologies:
Dynamic Contracts,
Granular work metrics and value estimation, precision time and labor tracking. Bidding exchanges, stock value instead of KPIs.
Enabling Organisational StructuresEnabling Legal Structures: Dissolution of the Non-Compete/Exclusivity Law.
Strengths of the Model
From the perspective of the employee
From the perspective of the employer
From the perspective of the middleman/broker
From the perspective of the SW Developer Team
From the perspective of The Market (Customer)
Weaknesses
Highly Competitive (Potentially Darwinian)
Subject to volatile market forces
New Opportunities Enabled by the Model
The Death of Venture Capitalists: Dynamically Emerging and Collapsing Ventures
The Democratization of Venture Capital (GoFundMe)
Potential Risks
Vulnerable Employees will suffer from market volatility
Vulnerable Enterprises will suffer from market volatility
Long Term Evolution of the Model: The Evolutionary Horizon: Dystopia or Utopia?
The Power Relationship between Employee and EmployerCustom Knowledge vs. Brute Artificial Intelligence
The Future of Intellectual Property
Robotics and the Role of Roboticization
Managing Change and Countering Resistance
There is Room for all:
Traditional Enterprises will remain "as is"
The Model will prove itself or perish
Conclusion
Such a model is certainly possible and plausible given the current trends in market and technology
But will require specialized software and systems to enable a true market - like unto a stock exchange
Potentially empowering to both employers and employees within the context of the Gig economy
While impacting the traditional Power relationship between employee and employer
With implications for IP via the concept of "Custom Knowledge" unique to the individual.
Having the potential to impact society in both dystopian and utopian ways.