Automated micro-outsourcing to reduce design costs by supporting hyper-specialization.

I have been re-reading Rodney Brooks "No Silver Bullet" paper. It is fantastic stuff, and I am glad that I came back to it (It has been several years since I last looked at it).

The paper is showing it age just a teensy tiny little bit (His enthusiasm for Ada and OOP seems slightly too strong in retrospect). With the benefit of experience, we now have a bit better understanding of how people react to complex tools, and as a result now tend to favor tools that encourage (or enforce) simplicity and consistency.

Anyway, that is not what I want to write about. The bit that particularly popped out at me this morning is the section on "Buy vs build". This chimes well with my belief that the only effective way to control software costs is through amortization. However, I had always limited my thinking to amortization within an organization, and so focussed my efforts entirely on how one could organize the source code repository to encourage reuse of components & libraries from within the organization, or engineer tools to help encourage reuse. (For example, an always-on background structural-similarity search to identify and bubble-up structurally similar source documents).

However, this does not address the concerns that one of my other closely-held beliefs implies. I believe that much of the value that is derived from development activities comes from the learning and resulting improvements in knowledge and understanding of the individual developers. This knowledge and expertise remains with the individual, and is a good part of the 10x performance differences that many people observe in software developers.

So, how about using the same sort of background structural-similarity search to identify potential collaborators / consultants whose expertise fits in well with the system that you are trying to create. In the same way that an advanced IDE would make the suggestion: "perhaps you want to buy this library to help you solve this problem here...", you could imagine the same IDE making the suggestion "perhaps you want to hire this developer to help you here..."

Or maybe it is just my recent involvement in the advertising industry that makes my mind turn so quickly to commercial transactions. :-)