News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why Development Teams Struggle to Deliver on Time, on Bud... by jbigelow76 on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:41AM (#17238724)
The reason that planning software development is bullshit is that you simply cannot know all the little details because in software development you're always doing something you've never done before (because if you did you could just copy-paste your previous work).

If you can plan and execute putting a person on the moon, you can plan and execute software development.

I think the problem is the overwhelming majority of software development is so low stakes, easy to replace, assumed that bugs are par for the course, etc... that most orgs have stopped putting real effort into planning AND executing on that planning, instead just cargo culting the planning phase.

Re:Why Development Teams Struggle to Deliver on Time, on Bud... by wvenable on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:51AM (#17238824)
You've missed the point. Nobody can (or did) accurately estimate how long the planning and development would take to get someone on the moon. Half the materials weren't even invented yet in 1962. Nobody knew that Velcro was flammable in pure oxygen.

Sure once all that expensive and unknowable planning and development is done, you can double-click that executable and put a man on the moon.

Re:Why Development Teams Struggle to Deliver on Time, on Bud... by toasterlovin on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:46AM (#17238788)
> If you can plan and execute putting a person on the moon, you can plan and execute software development.

But the budget for planning is limited. To realistically plan out most software projects would entail almost as much work as simply executing on them. That level of resources for planning vs. execution is acceptable for putting people on the moon. Probably not for building a line of business app.

Re:Why Development Teams Struggle to Deliver on Time, on Bud... by eitland on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @01:28PM (#17239971)
Getting to the moon took many many man years of planning, experiments, material development and cost a few lives. It also involved several of the worlds leading scientists, and probably the best computers money could get at the time.

If you can accept those kinds of preparations and also agree to not change the specs much (i.e. no, we aren't going to Mars instead) after we've started developing it I'll say we can get you a pretty nice estimate.

Re:Why Development Teams Struggle to Deliver on Time, on Bud... by harryf on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @12:04PM (#17238987)
> If you can plan and execute putting a person on the moon

I think you vastly overestimate the quality of the software and systems that took men to the moon. Try reading https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.space.com/26593-apollo-11-m... for example - you might conclude "they got lucky"

Re:Why Development Teams Struggle to Deliver on Time, on Bud... by denzil_correa on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @12:15PM (#17239130)
> If you can plan and execute putting a person on the moon, you can plan and execute software development.

Do we have the planning and estimates of projects that are similar to "put people on the moon"? I'd like to see how the plan/estimates of these projects look like and how they change.

Re:Why Development Teams Struggle to Deliver on Time, on Bud... by handbanana on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @12:01PM (#17238949)
> If you can plan and execute putting a person on the moon, you can plan and execute software development

Okay, but I think you've missed the point. Planning is hard, and you can't possibly account for all the variables.

Everything after that statement I can agree with