Alan Cooper presents the analogy that software development is like making movies in his book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum. [This is a fantastic book for getting an understanding of exactly how Cooper's perspective evolved over the last decade.] Cooper is presenting the analogy in the context of validating the business case for investing in interaction design.
Cooper points out that they’ve been making movies for a lot longer than we’ve been making software, and he’s exactly right that there is something to learn from the film industry.
How the movie industry works
The movie industry manages movies in three phases:
- Pre-production. Determining what the movie will be about, raising funds, storyboarding and designing the movie, getting actors signed, writing the script, etc.
- Production. Shooting the film. Directors, actors, and crew all working very expensively to get the film shot.
- Post-production. Tweaking and finalizing the film.
How software development parallels movie making
Software development involves three phases as well: Decide what to do, do it, and deliver it.
The interesting thing to note is that the film industry universally invests time upfront in pre-production, to minimize the costs of production. They recognize that production is more expensive than pre or post-production. Many software teams take the same approach, although Agile development explicitly does not. We gleaned some insight into Cooper’s perspective from our coverage of a debate between Cooper and Kent Beck.
If we accept Cooper’s premise that production is more expensive than pre-production, then software should follow the same model.
It’s worth noting that an agile process results in more design, not less. Beck might argue that redesigning as we go is less expensive, because we improve our ability to understand what we actually want to create during the process of creating it. Cooper disagrees.
As much as we like Cooper’s insights, the movie cost structure is not paralleled in the software development structure. When we hire developers, it is analogous to the old movie studios keeping actors on retainer – the cost is “fixed.” And the infrastructure costs of production (set creation, for example) are not affected by the time spent in production – they too are fixed. If we have a project with contractor developers, then we have a variable cost, and we lose money while those developers are “sitting around.” However, today’s projects leverage outsourced overseas contractors more and more – and these actors are a lot cheaper than script writers.
What we know in spite of the analogy’s flaws
We absolutely save time and money by defining requirements before we write the software. We also know that it is important to design before we code.
Neither of these statements conflicts with agile philosophies, if we take the approach of treating “design everything” with “design this one thing” similarly. An agile approach will simply have multiple design/implement cycles, each focused on a subset of the software (and allowing for a redesign phase prior to delivery).
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