On Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:02:23 -0400 (EDT), D. Jay Newman wrote:

>...
> I remember one project's suggested timeline that had 9 months of design
> time and only one week of programmer time! This was a project that was
> accepted with a revised timeline and took several years to program.

The thing that used to annoy me was when an inaugural meeting to discuss the feasibility of developing a new system 
was followed by 18 months of silence, while the powers-that-be cogitated on whether they wanted it or not, and then 
suddenly said "Yes, and we want it by the 1st of January", some time in September.  If it takes a year and a half to 
decide that it's needed, why do they think it only takes three months to make it happen?  (From scratch, with only a 
rough outline spec.)  And hiring-in extra people to make it happen faster is a stupid idea: "You can't get nine women to 
produce a baby in a month"...

And choosing the 1st of January as a release date is utterly moronic - for a start it's a holiday anyway, secondly a lot 
of things happen at the start of the year (accounting year-ends, and so on) so everyone is already busier than usual 
and won't have time to learn a new system, and finally it's preceded by the most disrupted time of the year, when 
many people take a few extra days from their annual allowance to make a ten or eleven day run of time away from 
work.  Not the time to have a looming deadline!

</rant>

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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