D : Not for me anymore

[Sean Kelly]

Karen Lanrap wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
> 
>> You generally flow down the steps from top to bottom, but at
>> *any* stage you can get loops back up higher.
> 
> Are you sure?
> 
> Assume an idealized situation where you take over a team of 10 
> designers and 490 coders.
> 
> Your team has projects A and B in the pipeline.
> 
> Project A is in the beginning of the design phase, planned duration 
> two years, and project B is in the beginning of the coding phase, 
> planned duration also two years.
> 
> your remaining budgets:
> for designing project A   4,000,000 $
> for coding project B    147,000,000 $
> 
> This means every month delay will cost you at least 6,000,000 $
> 
> Now one of your 490 coders comes to you saying: "I am unable to 
> implement this because of erroneous design."
> 
> Are you willing to "sell" this detection to your management, your 
> sponsor or your loan officer?

The typical response is to the coder to figure it out, ship a product 
with structural issues, and let the maintenance team deal with it.  And 
ten years down the road the product is so filled with such compromises 
that even theoretically trivial changes take days to fix, and often 
introduce additional bugs in the process.  But that's the coder's fault 
for not being capable or efficient, so you reprimand him and hire more 
programmers to pick up the slack.  Eventually a competing product is 
released by another company and you simply can't compete on a 
feature/cost basis.  New sales drop off a bit and you lose a few 
existing customers to the competitor, but encourage others to stick 
around with fancy service contracts and promises of a redesign.  And so 
it goes.  ;-)


Sean