It was around this time, in the middle of September '05, that I left for my first of many travel adventures. And it was there, somewhere between the Rhone valley in France and Mallorca, Spain, that I began to formulate my next steps. Trying to figure out my next career moves didn't seem to be so difficult after all. I realized that I still had passion for software development and the problem I wanted to tackle was in itself related to software development. I realized that I wanted to solve the problem that had plagued me throughout most of my career.
I finally wanted to build a product for myself.
In a career that spanned over two decades, through disparate organizations, cultures, technologies, process maturity levels, paradigms and application domains, I had never encountered i) effective and comprehensive integration between tools used throughout the software engineering lifecycle representing all stages from business case to product delivery; ii) a mechanism for defining and automating custom software engineering processes and workflows; iii) the ability to easily get reliable qualitative assessment of a project's progress at any point in time; or iv) a mechanism for capturing knowledge related to activities that occur throughout software engineering lifecycle.
So I decided that this was the problem set I wanted to tackle, for myself, and for others who had been similarly impacted in their careers by these issues. The statistics on software project failures, as reliable as they can be, were staggering. $19B lost per year in US alone either due to project overruns or cancellations. And the problem is further compounded by the increasing trend towards distributed development and offshoring (global investment of enterprise application software outsourcing grew by over 60% between 2002 and 2007). So it was a good place to start thinking of an opportunity for a venture. The $19B problem was only going to get bigger.
While this problem set became the impetus for zAgile, and while still in Mallorca, I developed the vision or the guiding principle that would drive zAgile. I called it The First Law of Software Development (aka Sanjiva's Law of Software Development). It was an assertion that simply stated that Software development is not just about implementing and managing processes (the traditional perception and focus). There are three other forces -- Collaboration, Community and Knowledge -- that equally influence the outcome of software engineering endeavors. However, these forces are typically either ignored, poorly understood or managed, and not well supported through tools and technologies. An acceptance, appreciation, and understanding of the impact of all of these forces on the overall delivery cycle, in my mind, was critical to one's ability to effectively and efficiently manage the delivery outcome to stated goals.
Whereas Chopin and Sand may have left with miserable memories of the winter they had spent in Mallorca (Ref: Un Hiver à Majorque by George Sand), I returned home to the Bay Area totally inspired, charged and armed -- with an interesting problem set, some key concepts and a vision (and two cases of some great french wines).
Luckily, I had found my passion again. Now, it was time to formulate some concrete next steps.
-Sanjiva
Ruinas de baños árabes, Mallorca
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