Software Development Lifecycle

[Mich the Tester]

Maybe if you included a requirements analysis phase at the start then you wouldn't consta... aww forgetit

STOP IT! You'll put contractors out of work if you say that!

[Troll]

You haven't sent any invoices, so by the end of this cycle you will be living under a bridge in a cardboard box drinking methylated spirit.

I usually gat parachuted in about midpoint in that list to turn it around

One of the pleasures of which is bringing it back onshore, making certain the idiots who signed up to the original approach are gone and the Steering Group knows the errors that have been made
Replace key positions with people I know will deliver
Mega invoice for the duration

Drive it through to a successful delivery and sign off

The great thing is its actually so easy to do and the work never stops coming

[suityou01]

Phew I'm glad it's not just me then.

I worked with Bobs on the last gig and they were extremely good.

This off shore team a just a bunch of recalcitrant retards.

This is a teensy weensy project with a teensy weensy budget. Also a teensy weensy data model. This data model is what they are arguing the toss over.

Suity : So the stored procedures are 90% complete?
Offshore : Yes Suity

Suity : Great news. So completed tomorrow then?
Offshore : Actually suity we need to implement error handling in all procedures.

Suity : <thinking> Ok error handling added as an after thought. Bit of a worry but if you criticise then you are technically a hypocrite. </thinking>
Suity : Err ok. So completed tomorrow then?

Offshore : Yes.
Suity : Great. And did you adjust the insert stored procedures so they all return the new row ID?

Offshore : No. Did you want us to do this?
Suity : As per the meeting on Friday, yes. As per my email of Friday after the meeting, yes.

Offshore : Ok fine.
Suity : So shall I adjust these estimates down to 50%

Offshore : Yes.
Suity : So not tomorrow then?

Offshore : No.
Suity : When then?

Offshore : Actually we have more concerns over the data model.



Fixed price bid my hairy spotty arse.

[d000hg]

Just checking that for a waterfall project :

It is Design, Build, Test, Deliver isn't it?

Not Design, Build, Quible about minor trivia on the design all day long so we miss our deadlines, never deliver in a month of Sundays?

Waterfall is fundamentally broken so not actually getting to delivery saves you a lot of bother when the client complain it is "not what they meant at all"

[TheFaQQer]

<BigBrotherVoice>
It's 34 days since Suity said he'd walk in two weeks if things didn't improve....
</BigBrotherVoice>

[Mich the Tester]

I usually gat parachuted in about midpoint in that list to turn it around

One of the pleasures of which is bringing it back onshore, making certain the idiots who signed up to the original approach are gone and the Steering Group knows the errors that have been made
Replace key positions with people I know will deliver
Mega invoice for the duration

Drive it through to a successful delivery and sign off

The great thing is its actually so easy to do and the work never stops coming

Me too. Trouble is, when I suggested they bring it back onshore and finish off in an agile approach, knowing that just about nobody can actually write proper requirements nowadays anyway, they explained that it's impossible to change from waterfall to agile mid-project. I can't remember the explanation, which is an indicator of my judgment of the quality of that explanation. So they didn't listen, the cycle continues, and I keep invoicing. Stupid ****whits.

[Mich the Tester]

Waterfall is fundamentally broken so not actually getting to delivery saves you a lot of bother when the client complain it is "not what they meant at all"

whs

[suityou01]

whs

Try operating an agile approach over a crackly telephone call with an off shore team with pidgin English.

Sometimes waterfall is the only way.

[Arturo Bassick]

Waterfall is fundamentally broken so not actually getting to delivery saves you a lot of bother when the client complain it is "not what they meant at all"

Waterfall works. It has limited uses, but does have uses. It has to be a project that is effectively a much repeated project and very well known.

[doomage]

waterfall - the urban myth

Are you savvy developers / PMs aware that the whole concept of 'waterfall' in software development was simply an academic misunderstanding?

Waterfall Accident

For those too lazy to read this, the relevant paragraph is: What we today know as the waterfall model comes from a paper with the title "Managing the Development of Large Software Systems", written in 1970 by Winston W. Royce. On page 2 it contains the famous diagram with the cascade starting at "System requirements" on the upper left, continuing on through "Program Design" and "Coding" down to "Operations" on the lower right.

But nobody seemed to notice that Royce does not promote this model. On the contrary, directly below he writes “… the implementation described above is risky and invites failure.” He then goes on to promote a different process: He recommends to “do it twice” by building a throw-away “pilot model” first to explore novel elements and unknown factors. Furthermore, in the introduction Royce admits that he has no data to back-up his ideas, he calls them "personal views" and "prejudices".

Somehow the intellectual lightweights of the time (project managers I'd expect) took the simple (but incorrect) solution as promoted it as the way forward and we have all suffered greatly since. Although some of you have invoiced well out of it I'd expect.

As Henry Ford said, thinking is the hardest work of all, which is why so few people do it.