Pragmatic Dictator

We’ve all seen it, customers change their requirements, add a few more features and yet expect the project deadline to stay the same even though there are no additional resources.

For some reason they act as if a software team has infinite, cost-free capacity. The psychology that drives this behaviour is somewhat unclear because there are various potential motivators such as political ambition, naivety or willful ignorance.

One might expect to see this problem occurring in waterfall projects but it can also plague early agile projects. Typically the backlog grows and grows, the customer has a desired release date in mind and expresses horror when it becomes clear that the whole backlog cannot possibly be implemented in the timeframe (accompanied by cries of “but I followed the process”).

It shouldn’t be possible to make this mistake given real-world experiences. For example:

We put our car in for an oil change, we get a quote for cost and an estimate for how long the work will take. We drop the car in at the garage and then a little later phone up and request additional work such as fixing the air-conditioning, replacing two tires, sorting the exhaust and swapping out the brake pads. Not for a second do we entertain the idea that the cost and time for the work will be the same as originally quoted.

Yet we still persist in the notion that a software development team is a bottomless pit of resource.

Tom Ayerst pretty much hits the nail on the head.

I would suggest just one more refinement:

Architecture and code need ongoing concern, review and re-organization. One simply cannot leave what has been previously built untended and focus on the next feature. It only takes one broken window……

The author of Code Complete and my favourite project management book Rapid Development is blogging over at Construx.

This should be good…..