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Jan 17The Billable Hour
by in Editor's Soapbox on 2017-02-23For every line of code that ends up in software the general public sees or interacts with, for every line in your Snapchats and Battlezone: Call of Honor Duty Warfare, there are a thousand lines of code written to handle a supply chain processing rule that only applies to one warehouse on alternating Thursdays, but changes next month thanks to a union negotiation. Or it’s a software package that keeps track of every scale owned by a company and reminds people to calibrate them. Or a data-pump that pulls records out of one off-the-shelf silo and pushes them into another.
That’s the “iceberg” of software development. In terms of sheer quantity, most software is written below the waterline, deep in the bowels of companies that don’t sell software, but need it anyway. That’s the world of internal software development.