Beautiful Teams

CMM Level Subzero, or "Processes, We Don't Need No Stinking Processes!"

Mission Statement: To give our clients a competitive advantage by applying advances in technology that enhances their customer relationships.

To describe our early software development practices as primitive would be an extreme understatement. After several months of slow progress, we reached a level of technology in software development equal to that of the clan of monkeys in the opening sequence of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, with similar levels of wild shrieking and skull crushing. In the plus column, I had previously seen the light—and had been delivered from evil—by the power and the glory of source control. From the start, we employed source control for our Visual Basic code. However, the vast majority of our business logic, a hundred thousand lines of T-SQL, remained unsaved in the limbo that was our development database. The extent of our SQL change management process started and ended with C$. All changes went through him. We had to assume he had some method to his madness. He was, after all, the self-professed greatest SQL Server developer in Pittsburgh (or was it the entire East Coast?). In his defense, he was not entirely conceited. He often brought up a developer and tech columnist who might have been better "but he died when his snowmobile crashed into a tree!…" And after his trademark paroxysm of laughter, he'd somberly say, "I feel really bad for his family, he was a father of three."

We rarely ...