Craft your own analyses: is it feasible?

The message behind humane assessment is that software engineers must learn to craft their own analysis tools. Often, when I put forward this message, I get the following reply: "Your message is not feasible. Regular engineers are not able to build analyses tools. As a consequence", the reasoning goes, "they have to be provided with ready-made tools".

There is a whole industry of standard tools based on this assumption. And they do well even if they do not make much of a practical difference.

This makes me think of a similar situation. A long time ago, before Gutenberg and his printing press, only a tiny amount of books got published. And they were expensive. After the printing press, more books got published, but still the costs were so significant that it lead to the forming of publishing houses and the associated business. In this system, only a small percentage of people were considered worthy of being published. A side consequence consisted in only a few people seeing themselves able to write. The regular population was only supposed to consume what got published.

In the meantime, the publishing platform became affordable to anyone. There is no need to get picked to get published. Anyone can just do it. For free, even. What is the result? It turns out that many people are able to formulate ideas in writing. Not all ideas are ground breaking, but many are sensible. The majority of the population still consumes what gets published, probably even more than before, but the publishing game is dramatically changed.

When there was no apparent possibility, there was no skill. Once the possibility was made apparent, the skill emerged.

Getting back to our developers, it is true that not all of them will produce ground breaking analyses. But that is not the point. Actually, we do need ground braking analyses. We need sensible one. This is feasible.