You Want IT When?

“I’d rather drive a Pinto that works every day than a Lexus that always breaks down,” said an unsatisfied customer of a company that delivered a product plagued with quality problems.  For him leading edge was less important than quality, or to put in other way, leading edge features that don’t work is like not having the features in the first place.  That’s true for most customers. 

It appears that the software development community believes that customers have a high tolerance for product defects.  How else can you explain the low quality that we often experience in the software products that we purchase?   I’ve often written about my experience with video editing software where it was difficult to find a product that could compile an edited sequence successfully.  Essentially, many of the video editing products at the time could not reliably complete the primary function for which people purchased them: compile sequences to a single AVI file.

(more…)

Is formal project management necessary to successfully deliver a software project?  The short answer to that is no.  Many successful software products have been launched without any project plans or schedules, at least not in the traditional sense.  When I first started in this field, project plans were not the norm, but that was when programs fit in a device with less than one megabyte of memory. 

(more…)

Why does it take so long to deliver software products? Many stakeholders ask this question during the course of a software development project.  It’s interesting when the developers ask this question because they know what it takes to implement the functionality in software, but in asking that question, some in the organization often fail to appreciate what it takes to deliver a commercial product to market.  From one perspective, they are correct; it shouldn’t take so long, but from a different perspective, the long duration is understandable — even if undesirable.  I’d like to explore the perspectives that explain these differences using a hypothetical delivery.

(more…)