Black Marble Wisdom

Steve Spencer and Rob (Boss) Hogg get down to business

We were very lucky enough to have Steve and Rob from Black Marble come over to Hull today to tell us about the business of software development. I think everyone should see talks like those, particularly people who think that creating software solutions is a technical problem. Because it isn’t. It’s pretty much an “everything else” problem with a bit of technology thrown in to make it work. Steve and Rob give about the best exposition of this that I have ever seen. They can talk about the mistakes that developers and managers make because they are candid enough to admit that they have made most of them over their time in business.

The staggering number of software projects that fail in the real world is down to human frailty as much as anything else, and what Steve and Rob do is point out the behaviours to watch for and the strategies that you can use to mitigate the problems.

My only regret about the talk was that we did not have more students there to get the benefit of it. Folks, if you thought about going but didn’t bother in the end, you have seriously missed out. With a bit of luck Rob and Steve will be back again next year, and you can get the benefit then.