Sean Walther's Blog

Steps to simplify complex projects

I just read a great article on the blog Lessons Learned by Eric Ries. 

The title of the posting, The engineering manager’s lament.

Summary

We’ve all been involved in projects that get out of hand.  Eric talks about how he managed to wrangle a project into control from the dangers of “scope creep” and the ever present management/engineering/sales problems.

You know how it goes, management asks, “Can your team get Feature A into the product by this absurd deadline?”.  You talk to your team, and they say they can.  

The deadline comes, and you have Feature A working.  However, your team doesn’t tell management that it has made some “questionable” engineering decisions along the way, and will have to still spend another few weeks making sure the implementation won’t break in the future.

Management sees the functionality working, and thinks work is done.

Management then decides to continue implementing new features, as current work is done.  Thus introducing bugs (or defects, as you will read in the article) that will affect development down the line.

Basically the article says that bugs are actually defects and bugs.  The author introduces a way of identifying these, as of yet, unidentified problems and advocates reporting these to management.  This should let management understand more about the decisions it is making, and also let your team be realistic about when they are actually done with a project.

Of course there are problems with this, and the author introduces various methodologies to address these issues:

• Start doing automated testing with continuous integration.  
• Run all tests and don’t permit check ins without running all previous tests.
• Learn from mistakes, develop tests to identify problems in the future, invest in preventing these problems.

Tags: Bugs, Project Management

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