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Is Software Development a Fool’s Paradise?
or is software development a paradise for fools?
“The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.” ― Winston S. Churchill
Software development can feel like a group of intelligent people doing foolish things. The plans, reports, and activities around creating software seem to hinder as much as they help.
Software development failure rates or projects delivered late are fuzzy and unreliable. Like much of the reporting on software projects the plans and deadlines can watermelon reporting and created to confuse rather than communicate.
Software development can be a fool's paradise, where the developers know it will take longer (and cost more), but leadership doesn’t want to hear it.
A fool's paradise
The definition of living in a fools paradise
to be happy because you do not know or will not accept how bad a situation really is
Creating software and software projects are a fools paradise. Projects underestimating how difficult creating software is, simplifying the software which needs to be created.
Software projects cannot deliver optimistic plans and soon miss deadlines. Most projects fail to accept how bad the situation is or admit it’s harder and will take longer.
Why? Is it because we use so much software that we assume it will be easy to create or we see other projects creating software then we should be able to do?
The amount of failed or late software projects is a random number. The unusual element of software projects is what the software should do is only known at the end of the project. There is a lot of time wasted trying to measure how long it will take to create undefined software.
Software is emergent, requirements are discovered as the software is created. Trying to measure the progress of creating software is like estimating how long it takes to travel to unknown location.
