Project disasters
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My two contributions: The software was obsolete by the time it was delivered The 5% exception was the 95% rule by the time the software was delivered Marc Help! I'm an AI running around in someone's f*cked up universe simulator.
Sensitivity and ethnic diversity means celebrating difference, not hiding from it. - Christian Graus
Every line of code is a liability - Taka Muraoka
Microsoft deliberately adds arbitrary layers of complexity to make it difficult to deliver Windows features on non-Windows platforms--Microsoft's "Halloween files"Marc Clifton wrote: The software was obsolete by the time it was delivered LOL!!! ATLAS and Ada come to mind... DOD Directive 3405.1 - Programming Languages[^] "Please don't put cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light" - Sign in a Bullhead City, AZ Restroom
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There's not many programmers doing this for a living who haven't run into their share of nightmare experiences. Almost none of them have to do with our skills as programmers, but rather come as the result of poor management or just plain Stupid Decisions. Here's my current list of project disasters:
- Blown or unrealistic deadlines
- Scope creep
- Unstable software (poor quality)
- Clumsy software (poor design or programmers constrained by management)
- The never ending / never delivered project
- Arbitrarily cancelled projects
- Maintenance nightmares
- Crisis management – changing directions every 5 minutes
Am I missing any? Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
- internal wars I formerly worked in a big company where mid managers were only trying to kill other's product line. In the end, out of the two product lines, one of the entire product line fell. Sadly, all managers remained in place, while "real" employees were sacked. VP dismissed the product development objectives as "well planned, badly executed". X| - internal marketing To motivate people to work on unexciting projects, managers put internal marketing in place. As anyone figures out, this only works in companies making a lot of money every quarter. In other words, product plans that are only intended to make us build a software which is not aimed to be sold, while at the same time maintaining (service packs) the existing software, really sold. Of course, only VPs know the real situation (unless they have a network share where anyone can read their plans...). X| - milestones passed "with restrictions". In fact the milestone objectives are not met but, to make sure PMs and managers get their bonus, the milestones are flagged as "passed with restrictions". The restrictions can be as impressive as "half the features are not there". The missing features or missing implementation are not planned in next milestone and simply expected to be implemented throughout next milestone, in addition to the next objectives. X| - employee performance management As soon as the performance plans were "implemented" in the compny, the direct manager was the only person giving a rate telling if your quarter objectives were met or not. Unfortunately, this strongly encouraged faked fellowship between employees and their managers in such a way that the only way to get a great rate was to booze with that person on friday evenings. X|
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There's not many programmers doing this for a living who haven't run into their share of nightmare experiences. Almost none of them have to do with our skills as programmers, but rather come as the result of poor management or just plain Stupid Decisions. Here's my current list of project disasters:
- Blown or unrealistic deadlines
- Scope creep
- Unstable software (poor quality)
- Clumsy software (poor design or programmers constrained by management)
- The never ending / never delivered project
- Arbitrarily cancelled projects
- Maintenance nightmares
- Crisis management – changing directions every 5 minutes
Am I missing any? Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
This thread looks to me a bit outdated given the current job climate in the software industry. For me, it's from now on much like "take the paycheck, protect the job", rather than "work in exciting new projects". Because of this, I am half way from starting courses to become a "lawyer". I am still thinking about other areas, the main idea is to be of use for the local community out there. The fact is, as I work in a company that builds and sells BI (business intelligence) performance tools, I drastically changed my mind since the software was put in place internally, i.e. used in our development cycles. I think so much that : - BI performance tools allow automation, which is another (politically correct) word for head reduction X| - BI performance tools are manipulation tools. They allow managers to build "performance reports" which are faking the truth. It's easy to draw charts which purposedly calculate faked trends, just to make sure the managers deliver the message they want. Sadly BI performance tools are marketed as "tools that make easy the extraction of data from database". It's a true lie, if any. X| - BI performance tools help companies build reports out of their databases. The truth is that, for instance in my company, the database is the bug database and, since QA people are expected to add 10 bugs / day / person, regardless how the product is far or near RTM, the trends which are built from the numbers are simply fake. Charts are fake. Manager decisions, based on chart trends, are faked, purposedly. We technical people are all fucked. SO much for BI tools... X| Next time you hear your company is using BI tools, beware...:wtf:
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There's not many programmers doing this for a living who haven't run into their share of nightmare experiences. Almost none of them have to do with our skills as programmers, but rather come as the result of poor management or just plain Stupid Decisions. Here's my current list of project disasters:
- Blown or unrealistic deadlines
- Scope creep
- Unstable software (poor quality)
- Clumsy software (poor design or programmers constrained by management)
- The never ending / never delivered project
- Arbitrarily cancelled projects
- Maintenance nightmares
- Crisis management – changing directions every 5 minutes
Am I missing any? Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
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There's not many programmers doing this for a living who haven't run into their share of nightmare experiences. Almost none of them have to do with our skills as programmers, but rather come as the result of poor management or just plain Stupid Decisions. Here's my current list of project disasters:
- Blown or unrealistic deadlines
- Scope creep
- Unstable software (poor quality)
- Clumsy software (poor design or programmers constrained by management)
- The never ending / never delivered project
- Arbitrarily cancelled projects
- Maintenance nightmares
- Crisis management – changing directions every 5 minutes
Am I missing any? Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
Christopher, I'd like to see one day some stats on the percentage of projects completed compared with the way they were organised. I'm sure that projects with heavy SA involvement fail more than any other. Regardz Colin J Davies
Sonork ID 100.9197:Colin
Warning Link to the minion's animation, do not use. It's a real shame that people as stupid as you can work out how to use a computer. said by Christian Graus in the Soapbox
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There's not many programmers doing this for a living who haven't run into their share of nightmare experiences. Almost none of them have to do with our skills as programmers, but rather come as the result of poor management or just plain Stupid Decisions. Here's my current list of project disasters:
- Blown or unrealistic deadlines
- Scope creep
- Unstable software (poor quality)
- Clumsy software (poor design or programmers constrained by management)
- The never ending / never delivered project
- Arbitrarily cancelled projects
- Maintenance nightmares
- Crisis management – changing directions every 5 minutes
Am I missing any? Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
I forgot one thing in my previous reply: Sales people giving delivery dates before the software is written (or hardware built in the case of embedded systemss). And to add to the fun this was life safety work so if you get it wrong you can kill a few hundred people... X| Glad to be away from there. Elaine :rose: The tigress is here :-D
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There's not many programmers doing this for a living who haven't run into their share of nightmare experiences. Almost none of them have to do with our skills as programmers, but rather come as the result of poor management or just plain Stupid Decisions. Here's my current list of project disasters:
- Blown or unrealistic deadlines
- Scope creep
- Unstable software (poor quality)
- Clumsy software (poor design or programmers constrained by management)
- The never ending / never delivered project
- Arbitrarily cancelled projects
- Maintenance nightmares
- Crisis management – changing directions every 5 minutes
Am I missing any? Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
- Product name versus Product features Lately in my company, marketing people have announced the name for a new product. Immediately followed by "we have a product name, we still don't know what it might be and what it might do". X| - Release date Believe it or not, in my company the CTO sets a release date for the next product version release, just because he wants a product release every quarter. This task is done and communicated prior to estimating the cost of the features. Then he starts adding the features we are going to implement. Of course, the set of features keeps growing up as we go since a lot of things were not anticipated, let aside things that can't be anticipated. The point is : as the features are added, the date is not moved. X| Don't get me started on the stability of the product when we reach the deadline. After adding 3, 4 times more features than predicted, the software only works on surface (elementary workflows). And is released as is. - Business-driven versus technically-driven Features are implemented but we end up implementing features without business case or even a functional test case to rely on. So we implement features guessing what our customers might like in it. On one hand, (pre)sales people have a lot of feature requests from potential customers. On the other hand, none of these requests are actually taken into account when implementing features for the next release. Quite predictably, although I have joined the company 6 months ago only, I have been told many many times already by peers that sales are having hard time selling the product. Yes, indeed! X| - Copyright infringement We have simply hacked proprietary file formats from other vendors. File formats are used in "data connectors" in order to import competitors' files. Nothing has been done under partnership or whatsoever. Clear copyright infringement. Managers don't want afford to ask a lawyer to work with us and reduce the chances to be sued. X|
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There's not many programmers doing this for a living who haven't run into their share of nightmare experiences. Almost none of them have to do with our skills as programmers, but rather come as the result of poor management or just plain Stupid Decisions. Here's my current list of project disasters:
- Blown or unrealistic deadlines
- Scope creep
- Unstable software (poor quality)
- Clumsy software (poor design or programmers constrained by management)
- The never ending / never delivered project
- Arbitrarily cancelled projects
- Maintenance nightmares
- Crisis management – changing directions every 5 minutes
Am I missing any? Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
Christopher Duncan wrote: Am I missing any? Client insolvent/bankrupt and cannot pay past nor present development costs! Rocky Moore <><
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There's not many programmers doing this for a living who haven't run into their share of nightmare experiences. Almost none of them have to do with our skills as programmers, but rather come as the result of poor management or just plain Stupid Decisions. Here's my current list of project disasters:
- Blown or unrealistic deadlines
- Scope creep
- Unstable software (poor quality)
- Clumsy software (poor design or programmers constrained by management)
- The never ending / never delivered project
- Arbitrarily cancelled projects
- Maintenance nightmares
- Crisis management – changing directions every 5 minutes
Am I missing any? Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
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There's not many programmers doing this for a living who haven't run into their share of nightmare experiences. Almost none of them have to do with our skills as programmers, but rather come as the result of poor management or just plain Stupid Decisions. Here's my current list of project disasters:
- Blown or unrealistic deadlines
- Scope creep
- Unstable software (poor quality)
- Clumsy software (poor design or programmers constrained by management)
- The never ending / never delivered project
- Arbitrarily cancelled projects
- Maintenance nightmares
- Crisis management – changing directions every 5 minutes
Am I missing any? Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
From personal experience - "Language Barrier"... I used to work for a Japanese company in the UK and we were asked to develop a video server for news organisations. We wrote a very detailed specification and sent it over to Japan. They replied saying "please build this"... Skip forward a year++ and we find out that: 1. They never read the spec as it was too long - they would have preferred no more than a couple of pages with a big picture. 2. There was already another spec in Japanese which wasn't translated until too late. 3. The project was really for NHK (Japanese TV station) to play TV programmes and not for news organisations. That was a really fun time for us... Oh yes, whilst we are on the subject you can add "Inappropriate Technology". The above project was required to use 12" magneto-optical discs for the video storage and they could hold a whole .... 20 mins of video. About this time Tek were making hard disk based video recorders quite cheaply that could hold much more. Ever hear of magneto-optical broadcast storage? No... Sucessful wasn't it. James.
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Another timeless example! Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
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Christopher Duncan wrote: Am I missing any? Client insolvent/bankrupt and cannot pay past nor present development costs! Rocky Moore <><
Ouch! That's gotta hurt on payday... Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
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Vaporware => any product which is sold/hyped before actually being created. Clueless managers commonly require the use of such products by their design teams because the donuts and alcohol flow freely at Marketing Events designed to presell them. The Motorola 68000 was one such product (I believe the term first came into usage when it was announced), as the Wescon where it was announced seemed to be completely dominated by it; data sheets were handed out, contracts signed, and products using it were designed two years before actual hardware was available. I also recall a language - it may have been Java, as all I remember of it was that it started with a J - that US Navy contracts required to be used for all firmware development. The contracts also specified that all coding had to use a fully DoD-qualified compiler. No such compiler existed, nor was ever qualified during the life of the contracts we worked on. "Please don't put cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light" - Sign in a Bullhead City, AZ Restroom
Roger Wright wrote: I also recall a language - it may have been Java, as all I remember of it was that it started with a J JOVIAL. I never used it, never met anyone who used it, and never saw any programs written in it. Sure heard a lot about it though... :suss:
Software Zen:
delete this; -
you really should read 'the mythical man month' and 'death march' and that list you will realise will just grow and grow...
Technically speaking the dictionary would define Visual Basic users as programmers.
But here again, a very generalized, liberal definition is being employed and it's wrong
- just plain wrong - Tom Archer 5/12/02Shaun Wilde wrote: you really should read 'the mythical man month' and 'death march' and that list you will realise will just grow and grow... Christopher Duncan could have written those two books :)
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africabrianwelsch wrote: I find my day goes by more smoothly if I never question other peoples fantasies. My own disturb me enough.
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- Updating software that should be scrapped
- Vaporware dependencies
- Reorganization
- Delayed Requirements w/out schedule relief
- Unmentioned Marketing promises to the customer
Just a few... "Please don't put cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light" - Sign in a Bullhead City, AZ Restroom
Roger Wright wrote: Updating software that should be scrapped ...is software that was totally re-written yet could have done beter with a simple upgrade :) I know I am the cause for that problem often enough. New things rock, old things don't. But of late I have learnt to better identify what needs to be re-written and what just needs a slap and tickle. Roger Wright wrote: Delayed Requirements w/out schedule relief Very true!
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africabrianwelsch wrote: I find my day goes by more smoothly if I never question other peoples fantasies. My own disturb me enough.
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There's not many programmers doing this for a living who haven't run into their share of nightmare experiences. Almost none of them have to do with our skills as programmers, but rather come as the result of poor management or just plain Stupid Decisions. Here's my current list of project disasters:
- Blown or unrealistic deadlines
- Scope creep
- Unstable software (poor quality)
- Clumsy software (poor design or programmers constrained by management)
- The never ending / never delivered project
- Arbitrarily cancelled projects
- Maintenance nightmares
- Crisis management – changing directions every 5 minutes
Am I missing any? Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
- latest project methodology always a great way of terminating a project with extreme prejudice - decide to use the latest project methodology and then tell the team that they are to only use this methodology to design and implement the project - no one understands the methodology so more time is spent learning the methodology rather then working on the project
Technically speaking the dictionary would define Visual Basic users as programmers.
But here again, a very generalized, liberal definition is being employed and it's wrong
- just plain wrong - Tom Archer 5/12/02 -
Shaun Wilde wrote: you really should read 'the mythical man month' and 'death march' and that list you will realise will just grow and grow... Christopher Duncan could have written those two books :)
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africabrianwelsch wrote: I find my day goes by more smoothly if I never question other peoples fantasies. My own disturb me enough.
I felt so happy after I read those books as I realised - "it isn't just me"
Technically speaking the dictionary would define Visual Basic users as programmers.
But here again, a very generalized, liberal definition is being employed and it's wrong
- just plain wrong - Tom Archer 5/12/02 -
Roger Wright wrote: I also recall a language - it may have been Java, as all I remember of it was that it started with a J JOVIAL. I never used it, never met anyone who used it, and never saw any programs written in it. Sure heard a lot about it though... :suss:
Software Zen:
delete this;Now that you mention it the memory comes back... JOVIAL it was, and I still wonder whether anyone ever successfully fielded a project using it.:-D "Please don't put cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light" - Sign in a Bullhead City, AZ Restroom
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Shaun Wilde wrote: you really should read 'the mythical man month' and 'death march' and that list you will realise will just grow and grow... Christopher Duncan could have written those two books :)
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africabrianwelsch wrote: I find my day goes by more smoothly if I never question other peoples fantasies. My own disturb me enough.
Paul Watson wrote: Christopher Duncan could have written those two books Did I mention my pen names? :-) Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
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Christopher, I'd like to see one day some stats on the percentage of projects completed compared with the way they were organised. I'm sure that projects with heavy SA involvement fail more than any other. Regardz Colin J Davies
Sonork ID 100.9197:Colin
Warning Link to the minion's animation, do not use. It's a real shame that people as stupid as you can work out how to use a computer. said by Christian Graus in the Soapbox
Colin Davies wrote: I'd like to see one day some stats on the percentage of projects completed compared with the way they were organised. If you ever find such stats, I'd be interesteed in a read as well... Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)