Few Words on “Rapid Development”
Steve McConnell’s book “Rapid Development ” was, and still is, a must read book to anyone who manage software development.
Dealing with software development and with software project management this book is one of the best guides I ever had (together with PMBok ). Yesterday I discovered Steve’s web site with references to his books and articles. I recommend adding it to your favorite bookmark list.
In the “Rapid Development” section Steve McConnell provide very useful excerpts. Here for example the summary of classic mistakes done in software development, and other type of, projects. As one that made more than one of these mistakes, and was witnessed for other making a handful of them too I can attest to the usefulness of this list.
| People-Related Mistakes | Process-Related Mistakes | Product-Related Mistakes | Technology-Related Mistakes |
| 1. Undermined motivation
2. Weak personnel 3. Uncontrolled problem employees 4. Heroics 5. Adding people to a late project 6. Noisy, crowded offices 7. Friction between developers and customers 8. Unrealistic expectations 9. Lack of effective project sponsorship 10. Lack of stakeholder buy-in 11. Lack of user input 12. Politics placed over substance 13. Wishful thinking |
14. Overly optimistic schedules
16. Insufficient risk management 17. Contractor failure Insufficient planning 18. Abandonment of planning under pressure 19. Wasted time during the fuzzy front end 20. Shortchanged upstream activities 21. Inadequate design 22. Shortchanged quality assurance 23. Insufficient management controls 24. Premature or too frequent convergence 25. Omitting necessary tasks from estimates 26. Planning to catch up later 27. Code-like-hell programming |
28. Requirements gold-plating
29. Feature creep 30. Developer gold-plating 31. Push me, pull me negotiation 32. Research-oriented development |
33. Silver-bullet syndrome
34. Overestimated savings from new tools or methods 35. Switching tools in the middle of a project 36. Lack of automated source-code control |
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