How to Fail at Software Development

1. Do you have weekly meetings?

Score at least 1 if you have a regularly scheduled weekly meeting. Arbitrarily holding meetings at regular intervals wastes time. And the meeting should be short with its length entirely dependent on the items that need to be covered. The only things that should be discussed are things that affect everyone on the project. Individual stuff should be left for one-on-one conversations. Weekly meetings are not inherently evil, but they do mostly waste time.

Score at least 2 if the meeting has a tendency to stretch out and include things that could just as well be sent around by email. This kind of meeting usually begins with some earth shattering news about the new lines that are to be painted in the parking lot and the changing of the spelling of one of the names of a company executive. (Some people contend that when there is a name change it’s actually a different person, but it’s hard to be sure because nobody has ever actually seen one of these people. Anyway, such a name change never has any effect on the project.)

Score at least 3 if everybody has to prepare a status report for the week. It usually means that the meeting will run long and all this preparation takes up even more time. We’re slipping into bureaucracy here.

Score at least 4 if each individual reports his or her status from the prepared report. The status and problem reports are not necessary except in cases where the manager doesn’t talk to anybody and has no idea what’s going on. This kind of reporting generally indicates that the manager doesn’t really have time to manage the project. The manager is mostly absent (although it could just be mentally). A productive team member has to spend a lot of time preparing because he has lots to fill out. The members who don’t do much anyway, can copy last week’s report and get right back to rephrasing memos. In addition to all this, a large part of the preparation seems to involve lots of time talking about the meeting.

An aggravated example of a weekly meeting can rate a score of 5. This kind of meeting goes on and on. There is the inevitable round robin where each person, in turn, explains what they have been doing and what difficulties they have been having in doing it. Nobody cares. The people who are actually doing something report on some internal details that have no effect on anyone else. The most fascinating thing that comes from this kind of meeting is the knowledge that people have the same problems week after week after week. The only positive thing that comes out of such a meeting is the relief when it’s finally over.

Chapter 8 of How to Fail at Software Development contains some examples and describes the pitfalls of weekly meetings.