The name Botonomy comes from a combination of Bot and Autonomy. I’ll explain why. But first a quick detour through IT sourcing strategy.
I believe that innovation, rather than inexpensive labor (i.e. offshore), is the optimal path to low cost / high value technical delivery. I’m confident that hindsight will make it blatantly obvious that optimizing for team agility, rather than shooting for the lowest possible blended hourly rate, is the surest way to cost-effective quality delivery on a sustainable basis. A lack of agility makes it more difficult to adapt should a more profound understanding of the real requirements of your project come to light.
Solving the wrong problem, even at $1 per hour, is still too expensive.
For this reason, the bane of CIOs everywhere is the risk of building a well-engineered, thoroughly tested, well-documented implementation of the wrong system. It’s a situation where you spent the money (and in many cases, lots of it), and the thing that you paid for doesn’t solve your problem. Now you have two problems.
So as we surveyed the IT services marketplace, we considered two probable trends:
- The global IT services market, like all other markets, wants to move toward equilibrium. This means that the value proposition of offshore development will likely weaken over time as the better offshore teams command higher and higher salaries.
- Those same market forces will continue to push down the cost of computing hardware and software, as the commoditization of advanced technology makes its slow and steady creep forward.
So we had an idea:
What if we could outsource a lot of the mundane tasks associated with application development projects to software, rather than handing that work off en masse to a team of strangers in Elbonia?
This notion of project automation is far less “Science Fiction” than it appears. We’ve already seen this shift in the quality assurance space. The impact that xUnit testing and Continuous Integration have had on software quality is game-changing.
We believe that similar improvements can be realized in some of the other qualitative aspects of project management, by making the automation software “feel” less like a software package and more like a person working offsite.
There’s a concept in literature known as Anthropomorphism, which is defined as ” Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.” We applied this same concept to software architecture (as many others have before us), building out small autonomous programs, or “Bots”, that we gave names and job descriptions to, and configured them to show up in our Instant Messaging buddy list.
We developed these bots in a way that we could chat with them in English via standards-based Instant Messaging (IM), but they also understood how to talk to other software such as email, web servers, etc., (largely since we’ve built our applications atop Twisted). This approach has also proven to be an interesting means of managing application complexity.
We’ve done a ton of cool stuff with bots, most of which is behind the scenes, and some of which is teed up for future releases of ProjectPipe, and/or other applications that we have in our pipeline.
At the end of the day, Botonomy’s mission is to help small teams solve large problems. Our Bot-based architecture offloads some of the heavy lifting from team members, so that the team has greater autonomy in terms of their options for reacting to change. In contrast, a team with no bots and lots of offshore resources is far more encumbered should they need to turn on a dime. A bigger team usually means fewer choices.
As a small team ourselves, we’re eating our own dogfood every day. We use all of the software that we write, and we managed the development of ProjectPipe using ProjectPipe. We also have bots performing a handful of backoffice functions.
The verdict: So far, so good.
