--Originally published at TI2011 – Roger's Rad Records
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Tag: deadline19
Chapter 19 Reflection
--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management
Chapter 19: Part and Whole
Aristotle Kenoros was a morning person. If he was going to make an appearance, it was most often the first business of the day. This morning, Mr. T arrived at his office to be told by Mrs. Beerzig that Morovia’s First Programmer was waiting for him inside. Mr. T. found him sitting on the desk, staring up at a matrix of letters he had drawn on the whiteboard.
For the purposes of this grade, I did not consider so much the quality of their designs as whether they had produced a design at all. If you have a low-level modular design that serves the function of a blue print that is, it establishes what all the coded modules will be and what interfaces there will be among them then Kenoros gives you an A.
All the small teams got A’s and B’s. The big teams got all the F’s. and the Oracle’s concept of Last Minute Implementation is going to be impossible without a good design. In fact, they are not going to be doing Last Minute Implementation. The six A Teams started coding long ago. I had no success persuading them to defer implementation. all the B and C Teams are trying out the Oracle’s approach. They are all trying to push back implementation, and to do as much verification work as pos- sible before a single line of code is written. Some of them are trying rigorously to defer coding until the last sixth of the project.
Kenoros has a teory that the teams were too big. During the whole time that design should have been going on, they had too many people to involve in that activity. Design is a job for a small group. they Continue reading "Chapter 19 Reflection"
Deadline review XIX
--Originally published at TI2011 – FABIAN'S GEEK STUFF
Hello there, and welcome back to this section that I like to write and call reviews of knowledge that have changed my life. As annoying as appear they keep talking about team, and specifically how they are made and specifically for what the project or teammates that can contribute to ot. Many times the design... Continue Reading →
Deadline, Chapter 19
--Originally published at TI2011 – Miguel’s Blog
This chapter kicks off with Tompkins talking with Kenoros. Kenoros told him that he had graded the design of every team, the quality of the design didn’t matter to him, what mattered was that there was a design at all. All A teams had an awful score. The reason was that these teams were overstaffed and design was not suited to a large group. Design was better done with a team of 5 or 6 people. When you have 20 or more people, you can’t just have do nothing, so the teams jumped straight to coding. With such a tight deadline, the teams needed to do a last minute implementation without bugs, but with no design that was going to be difficult. Skipping design can lead to some big consequences like the project deviating from its goal or reaching the goal in a non-convenient way.
You can try and divide a project when doing design, but most of the time that results in no design being done. Dividing a project at design time will result in a lot of interfaces between people which in return increase meeting times, interdependence and frustration.
Later, a manager from a smaller team came requesting more people to work under her. This was unexpected at first, since the reason why the team was doing so ewell was because of the small team size. However, they were mostly done with the design and when the implementation part came along, there would actually be work to do for 35 more people. Turns out that the optimal team size varies throughout the project’s lifespan.
“When the detailed, low-level modular design is done, opportunities for splitting up the work explode.”
Projects started with an aggressive deadline tend to take longer than those started with a reasonable deadline. Even
