mark.w.schumann

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Programmer optimism, and the "Death March"

I’m tired of hearing lines like “programmers are such optimists,” said in a disparaging way, by people who should know better. It’s a common refrain in corporate offices, usually when a software project is running late. Often the blame is placed on the programmers who are working for free on nights and weekends to make stuff work.

The project isn’t late because developers are braggarts. It’s because management has assigned them too much to do, which, as Peter Kretzman warns is the best way to not get what you want from your I.T. organization.

The “optimist” accusation is a cheap shot, and here’s why.

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, 20 comments ,

The one essential Agile ingredient

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
—Oscar Wilde

As I wrote last Friday, you just can’t know everything at the beginning of a project. A lot of times, you can’t even know things at the end either! That’s one way of looking at the whole “Agile” concept–simply realizing that your knowledge is limited and therefore letting go of a lot of things that you can’t control correctly anyway.

So what kind of manager works best with an Agile team?

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Project Planning: "Can we kill 'em tomorrow?"

What kind of organizations benefit from an agile approach to software development?

I was thinking of this around a year ago while working with a client who was thinking of reimplementing, for the first time, some important applications with .NET. One of the business-interface people started a planning meeting by stating:

Before we do anything else, we need to plan this whole project in detail. We need to know exactly how this is going to be done. Right now.

I don’t recall exactly how I responded out loud, but the monologue in my head went something like this:

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Good ideas in a Daily Scrum

Someone asked on LinkedIn the other day how to handle technical discussions in a Daily Scrum meeting that is ending early: do you use the free time, or defer the discussion for after the meeting?

To me, that’s an easy call. You do not have time for technical discussions in a Daily Scrum, the same way you do not have time to talk about last Sunday’s football game in traffic court. It’s not a matter of time, it’s a matter of focus and appropriateness.

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