A must read Article: Development Abstraction Layer
Few days before GreenNWhite posted about an excellent article. This article is about Development Abstraction Layer ; for me it's a way to manage successful software company. This article published on Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky . Initially he started with definition of Software , different than definitions in Software Engineering books. Software is a conversation, between the software developer and the user. But for that conversation to happen requires a lot of work beyond the software development. It takes marketing, yes, but also sales, and public relations, and an office, and a network, and infrastructure, and air conditioning in the office, and customer service, and accounting, and a bunch of other support tasks. This is the lesson which most of project manager does not understand and sometime developers too! Then he described Development Abstraction Layer! Think of your development abstraction layer as a big, beautiful yacht with insanely powerful motors. It's imp