I wish software squeaked.

We all know that the software industry has been in trouble since its inception. Books like the Mythical Man Month by Brooks and the infamous 1968/69 NATO Software Engineering Reports were the first articulations of the so called software crisis. More recently there was the year 2000 fiasco, which, through a mixture of over exaggeration and tons of money spent on corrective action, turned out to be not that big of a crisis after all. In fact, the whole software crisis has never really reached crisis proportions. Sure, there have been some well documented software disasters, but every industry has its share of these. To me, a crisis implies that something is at the brink of collapse. I don't recall the software industry being on such a brink. The riches of the software industry show there has certainly been no financial collapse. Software only gets more remarkable as time marches on. New companies, whose livelihood depends 100% on software, emerge at a steady pace, go public, and create billionaires.

Yet everyone in the industry knows that there are big issues with software development. Its more of a relative crisis than an absolute one. Software engineers lament that software engineering is nothing like other forms of engineering. It is far less controlled, it has far less agreed upon norms, it relies too much on subjective taste, and its practitioners differ in talent by at least an order of magnitude.

The problem is that software does not squeak.

If a machinist machined a ball bearing or other part even a few thousandths of an inch off tolerance then, when deployed, the device would squeak, vibrate or otherwise do noticeably ugly things that would get progressively worse with time. Poorly engineered mechanical parts don't only squeak, they wear. And they do so rapidly.

In my job as a consultant for major corporations who can afford to pay for the best talent, I have seen lots of software that would squeak if it was in software's nature to do so. Hell, I've written some myself. If it only could squeak, how great it would be!!

Have you ever been in the position of explaining to a CEO, CFO or non-technical manager that the software they were entrusting their company's livelihood was really horribly engineered? What if the political climate at the company was not receptive to such dire news? What if, to make matters worse, the software seemed to work basically fine? Oh sure, a small outage here, a dropped customer order there, well these things happen. The business behind the software is complex, after all. Time to market is paramount. Yada, yada, yada.

But what CEO, no matter how technologically ignorant, would put a machine into the market that squeaked. He would look like an utter fool. Oh, how I wish software squeaked!! For if it did, the CEO would never find out about it, the engineers would be too embarrassed to ever let it out of the shop. Oh dear Turing, why don't your machines squeak!

I wish I could end this essay with the news that I have discovered a way to make poorly engineered software squeak. Sadly, no. I can't make it squeak and it probably never will. Some have made attempts at the equivalent of a squeak. Things like cyclometric complexity analyzers and the like. But the value of these metrics are highly contested among software professionals and there is slim hope they would sway a reluctant CEO into action. Squeaks are incontrovertible, metrics are not.

The best I can offer, and I'll be the first to admit its inadequacy, is to engineer your software as if it could squeak. And don't try to fix it with the equivalent of a glob of grease!