Have We Finished Yet?
by Suzanne Robertson
In his keynote talk on dependable software at the 2005 Requirements engineering conference, Daniel Jackson’s urged us to “move away from infatuation with completeness”. This started me wondering – how often does anyone ever finish anything? In our everyday lives we say we have finished cleaning the bathroom, cooking the dinner, watering the garden, ironing the shirt, cleaning our teeth and a myriad of other things. But we don’t really mean that we have finished. Instead we mean that we do not have any more time to devote to that task and we have done the best that we can within that constraint. We accept the fact that we have limited time and that few of life’s daily tasks are finished to one hundred per cent perfection. Why should building software systems be any different?
A common complaint of software developers is that they don’t have enough time to finish a project. People in other professions for example engineers, architects, doctors, composers have the same problem but they have learnt to treat this as a normal constraint of their profession. They accept that:
- there will always be more to do than fits into the time available
- dynamics of the world mean that there will be changes that necessitate negotiation and replanning
- they need to be able to communicate their plans to their clients.
This perspective is about how software developers can use these principles to free themselves from “infatuation with completeness”.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Have We Finished Yet.pdf | 183.88 KB |
Yes - incremental payments....
You are correct - the ideal scenario for iterative and incremental delivery is "pay as you go"....and most companies have not figured out that a customer should pay for the delivered pieces and....get the best quality since more time is spent and fewer business events were delivered or promised. The solution provider must be prepared to deliver incrementally based on highest business value and return to the customer. It MUST be a Collaborative effort to achieve the best quality for the least amount of money....
My experience has not seen many, in fact very few, that will understand and risk this arrangement - the customer often likes to appear ignorant about what they really want when they see it and the solution provider is typically not trusted by the customer to deliver what they REALLY want! Yet the solution provider continues to bill the customer for rework that drives the project costs up - leading to sunk costs and often applications that never get deployed.
And the dance of project management continues.....