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”.
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Expectations about completeness, and money, and . . .
Brad, I am a BA with a permanent position so I don't have the payment problems you describe. However, stakeholders in my world often don't understand key aspects either.
You cite the follwing quote from the article:
"We have implemented software to support these 35 business events and we can show you precisely which business requirements are supported by which pieces of software and what business value is being provided. The current plan is to add the remaining 15 business events to the second version of the software when the funding is approved.â€
If I said that, the response in my world would be:
"Great! So we're done then!" (In other words, forget about getting funding for the second version of the software. We're happy that something got done and we're ready to move on to the next thing we think is cool.)
This is just one example from my world, but you probably get the idea.