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How Software Project Plans Have Become Laughably Inaccurate
It’s an evolutionary process — from accurate and helpful to frivolous, inaccurate, and pretty much pointless.
If you’ve been in the Grand Game of Software Engineering as long as I have then you can be very sure of several things on a day to day basis.
Firstly, the most technically qualified people, upon whose shoulders rest the technical competence of the project, the core of the required creativity and technical excellence, will be completely ignored, continually sidelined, and gradually, and inevitably, be drained of their will to live.
Secondly, the project budget, something you may think would obviously be allocated to the key factors in making the project successful (i.e. bringing it in on time and in budget) will necessarily be allocated in a completely diametric, haphazard, and maximally inefficient way.
The number of management droids will rapidly increase, the number of “collaboration and tracking” tools will exponentiate, and the whole place will be knee deep in multi-coloured little bits of paper (all alike) before you can say “shouldn’t we be writing some software?”
And lastly, the project timeline, probably the most important thing in the whole planning and execution of the project right through from what you’re making, why…
