Cherry-picking

[David Dyer-Bennet]

On Tue, June 8, 2010 14:46, Mark A. Flacy wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 13:36 -0500, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
>
>> You can't "guarantee" (in any meaningful sense) both completion date and
>> feature list.  "Estimates" are just that; they're not guarantees, and
>> trying to force engineers to treat them as guarantees is basically
>> futile
>> (and leads to death marches and really shitty software).
>
> You have got to be joking.

Not joking.

> If you can't do that, you aren't doing engineering.

Some truth to that; what's called "software engineering" is pretty
marginal as an engineering discipline.  What we do would be "research and
development" in most other fields, not engineering.

No doubt there are places that deal with simple enough software problems
in stable enough software environments that they can do actual
engineering, but I've never actually seen one.

And if schedule is important enough, you bias your estimate; work towards
"no later than" rather than "best estimate".
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info