How to Fail at Software Development |
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7. Are software development decisions being made by company policy? |
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| Score from 0 to 6. | ||||||||
| Odd decisions about how software is to be written can come from the upper reaches of a company. One of the main problems with this situation is that, no matter how silly an edict may be, there is no recourse or discussion. If this is happening, score the severity of it from 1 to 5. It is not possible to list all the items that would fit any specific case because such decisions are random and they bear an aura completely devoid of logic. The items listed here will give you an idea of what can happen and how much each decision costs the project. Comparing this against your situation should give you an idea how to score it. Of course you should score 0 if your project runs independently of the rest of the company. You are in charge of your own destiny. That is, if all software development decisions are made inside the team, then you won’t have to worry about arbitrary decisions bumping you off the rails. Score at least 2 if the database has been selected by company policy or by the user. Decisions that come down this way are generally made without any technical considerations whatsoever. It’s normally a salesman-to-suit proposition. If the chosen database is completely wrong for the project, you may want to score this as high as 5. Score at least 3 if the communication or user interface packages have been pre-selected. This particular situation is much less likely to occur than it has been in the past, but it still happens. Score at least 4 if the programming language has been chosen by someone not directly involved with programming. This situation can get almost humorous in its perversity. Score as much as 6 depending on how inappropriate the language is to the job. It is possible to use COBOL to write a communications module, and it's possible to use Fortran to write a device driver. It’s even possible to write software in Pascal, but experiences such as these are not pleasant and they take a lot longer than they should. |
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