Why Development Teams Struggle to Deliver on Time, on Budget, or at All

Re:Why Development Teams Struggle to Deliver on Time, on Bud... by diego_moita on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:20AM (#17238490)

A lot of people have been praising this "estimates based on data and rigorous planning" for decades. Steve McConnell wrote a whole book about it (Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art).

It works only very special circumstances: when the task can be very well defined because it has been done a lot of times before and the people doing the task are very experienced on it.

But the caveat is that if you are doing such a task you're not really doing any innovation at all. Actually, if it is so well defined and trivial it should probably already have been automated.

True innovation must have a lot of unknowns, it isn't innovation without it.

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Re:Why Development Teams Struggle to Deliver on Time, on Bud... by nradov on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @01:06PM (#17239709)

If you actually read Steve McConnell's book the focus is really on accurate estimates more than data and rigorous planning. He makes it clear that a high level of precision is impossible in some cases. (Many people fail to appreciate the difference between accuracy and precision.)

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Re:Why Development Teams Struggle to Deliver on Time, on Bud... by raphaelb on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @01:29PM (#17239984)

I haven't read the book and was going to ask about accurate vs precise but found this helpful article discussing it as it relates to software here if anyone else is curious about that distinction: http://itsadeliverything.com/accuracy-vs-precision-in-estima...

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Re:Why Development Teams Struggle to Deliver on Time, on Bud... by brightball on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:28AM (#17238586)

For what it's worth, the examples in that book are usually contract development shop where you're doing the same thing for multiple clients over and over.

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