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posted 12/05/06 by Anthony Governanti Behind the Curtain - Part 1

I'm going to try to bring you a series of posts that hopefully give you all a glimpse of the inner workings of Autodesk, at least from my perspective, and the software development process. I'd like to share with you, what I am legally allowed to anyway, some of the things that I find interesting that I see on a daily basis.

Sausages and Software
So what do they have in common? A little more then you might think. When I first started here at the 'Desk more then 6 years back, I heard someone quote a saying "There are two things that you never want to know how they are made; Sausages and Software". This statement struck me as pretty funny at the time, but later I came to realize how profound it really is.

Essentially, sometimes there are hard decisions to make or things that a software company has to do in order to get a product out on time and as stable as possible. Does it always work? No I would say it doesn't, and I'm not just talking Autodesk here, I referring to all software, all types. For sausages, if you could see how they are made, you'd probably not want to eat sausage ever again. Well that's where the analogy will stop short, because what I hope to give you is a sense that things are not all bad here behind the scenes, and that the decisions made and the direction we take with our products, particularly Civil 3D, are made with the best interests of both our customers AND our company in mind. My hope is that you'll come away with a feeling or at least a realization that in the end, everyone that works here is human, and that we care about the work we do, and we care about what you think about it.

So the first thing I want to discuss is how high level decisions are made when it comes to the features that make it into the product each release. We use a system here called a Pairwise comparison. This is a way to compare items to each other in an ordered fashion.

Essentially, we take a list of features, usually in buckets or groups, and we order them, say 1-20. Then a group of folks sit in a room together, and start to compare the items. You start with number 1 and compare it to number 2, ranking which of the two is more important. Then you move to comparing number 1 to number 3, again ranking which is more important, 1 to 4, 1 to 5, so on a so forth. After a while, you will have compared every item to every other item, and will have a ranked list of which ones are most important. We then take this list and start to prepare the development cycle of actually writing specifications and developing code.

This means that there is an actual process and there are hard decisions to be made. Let's face it, there are only so many horus in a day, and only so many days in a development cycle. So the hard decisions have to be made, and sometimes features that would be really cool, or are things that we've been waiting for a long time (cough, H&H, cough) have to be put off until the correct resources and scheduling can be commited. I just want you all to know that there is a real process, and there are real people involved in it, and the process is evolving everyday. I can say from first hand experience that it works pretty dam good, and its only getting better.

So now you probably saying "That's all well and good Govna, but who picks the list of items that get compared in the first place?"

Well, I'll get to that in Part 2.

Till next time,
Cheers,
AG

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