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Wednesday, May 12, 2004

some ideas that just don't work in software development

"The definition of insanity is doing exactly what you did before all over again, but expecting different results this time.". I don't remember where I have seen this quote first but I really liked it.

In last 7 years in Software development I have seen few ideas which are already tried and failed. But invaribale after some months or years some one comes up with the these same ideas AGAIN. Again it fails. Cycle repeats few months after. Its CRAZY but it happens always.

Some ideas I have encountered and which always fail are

1. We need some more processes. Then everything will be alright.
2. Lets use a project metric to measure individual performance (e.g. bugs/kloc, LOC/per day, bugs reported /day etc are the favourites)
3. Lets create/define a check list to ensure that all steps are followed by everyone.

Looks very sensible on first read. Problem is it almost never works in practice !!!

Why ? In next few blogs I will try to explain (from my point of view) why it doesn't work in practice ?

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