This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Who's code is that anyway? Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Now, here's an interesting post - code ownership horrors. It's a good post - the introductory summation explains the problem quite well:

As a result, my interest in these projects has dipped precipitously close to zero. Why should I care? I'm a middleman. I have no ownership stake in the project. And neither do the offshore developers, except in terms of fulfilling their contractual obligations. What happens when nobody owns a project? Well, that's why lots of internal software sucks pretty badly. Renters don't take pride in their homes. Only homeowners do.

This is true whether the code has been outsourced to a local consulting firm, a "big" consulting firm, or sent offshore. The rental/owner dichotomy is a good comparison, I think. There are tons of people who want to turn software production into an assembly line process. I have my doubts. It seems to me that software production is still a craft - more akin to making a movie than to building a set of hardware widgets. Lots of hardware production is completely automated, and it's mostly a matter of "how many in what time interval" at this point. Movies have been being made for a long time now - and they aren't managed like an automated process.

I think software is a lot more like movie production than it is like hardware - and I think that understanding that points out a lot of the issues with outsourcing and automation.