Are Taylors Standardized Process and Principles of Scientific Management Applicable to Software Development - Term Paper Example

The paper “Are Taylor’s Standardized Process and Principles of Scientific Management Applicable to Software Development?" is a  convincing example of coursework on management. There are various defined and designed approaches to software development that are employed during the development process of software. These processes are what make software become what it is after the completion stage. However, the success of any process demands orderliness and efficiency in order to achieve the desired goals. This is according to Taylor’s Principles of Scientific management, where the scholar emphasized structured processes that could enhance the effective achievement of a goal. Unfortunately, profound changes have happened on Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, and the software development happens not to fully meet Taylor’s emphasis on processes. This paper will analyze three software development processes, namely; waterfall model, V model, and agile model.  And further evaluate them with respect to Taylor’s three categories, namely; fully standardizable, partially standardizable and not standardizable.  

The whole concept of embracing processes is all about increasing efficiency, and this is the truth of the matter in software development, as it is, in any other sector, and it should be discerned that managing person also subscribe to this. Software development has process models where each process model subscribes to a specific life cycle, so as to achieve success in software development. (France, & Rumpe, 2007, pp. 779) Nonetheless, below is an illustration of whether Taylor’s standardized process is applicable to software development.

The waterfall model; this process falls under the standardizable category. This is because it is normally considered as a robust and dramatic resemblance to the Taylors-like approach in software management. The process model is progressive, foreseeable, and all phases unfold forthright while in the end, it delegates the execution of the process to labor workers. Waterfall emulates command and control in the execution of its operations, where management imparts orders while labor workers get on the road. There is no doubt that the “control and command” aspect of the process makes it akin to Taylorism, which is infamous for its standardized and structured processes. (Provaglio, 2011) Waterfall methodology is an approach that involves arranging software work into discrete phases, which are focused around developing documents that specify features of the system to be developed. In fact, a traditional waterfall process goes through the following stages; collecting requirements and needs from customers, crafting, writing code, and evaluating whether the system meets the requirements. (Agile labor union, 2015) The fact that the process can be broken down into discrete stages and can be repeated over and over again implies that it embraces Taylorism's structured processes. By the virtue of this, waterfall fits the standardizable description.

V-model process; just as the name suggests, the Validation model comes as a partially-standardizable approach. The model follows a sequential path of implementation of processes, whereby each path must be finished before the next phase commences.  However, this process has parallel testing of the software product with the correspondence of development. The analogy of testing the processes’ product in a parallel manner makes it partially-standardizable, mainly because the process will hardly allow discrete and repetition of tasks. Doing the testing, on a side by side approach will hinder the breaking down of the process into discrete tasks, hence the reason for assigning the process to a partially standardizable category.

Agile model; this process comes under the not standardizable group. Just as the name suggests, agility is all about dynamism, being context-specific and growth-focused. Different from Taylor’s principles of scientific management, the agile methodology does not focus on efficiency or cutting costs, which makes the process not so likable by organizations. Moreover, the agile process model does not document its activities. Instead, software projects are operated through the production of extensive and in-depth specification documents, developed in isolation and then passed down to the next stage. This phenomenon not only makes it hard to repeat the tasks chronologically but also breaks it down into a discrete phase. This is what makes the process fall under the not standardizable category. (Poppendieck, & Poppendieck, 2003, pp. 879)

Conclusion
There is no doubt that Taylor’s standardized process is relevant and applicable to software development to some extent, most particularly, in terms of efficiency, through structured processes. It is also interesting to note that the concepts used by software programmers were not actually discovered by these technology experts, but instead, it stemmed from the work carried out by people such as Taylor, Mayo, and many other management scholars. According to Cooper and Taylor (2000, pp. 555-578), many structured processes applied in software engineering are akin to those concepts advocated by Taylor’s principle of scientific management. Moreover, they further assert that the first software developers applied Taylor’s concepts as an approach to attain high levels of trust and dependability in the software-intensive mission.