Terse Systems : Death by Schedule

Death by Schedule 2

Posted by wsargent Mon, 24 May 2004 10:10:00 GMT

Laurent Bossavit talks about how schedule pressure can lead to people dying.

This happens all the time. Afterwards, people say “Oh, if we had known… Now it will be different.” And then they do the same thing all over again.

EDIT: And it doesn’t even work.

Brian Hanafee about 21 hours later:

Might also want to check out Tom Demarco’s book “Slack”. It has some great insight into the penalties of hyper-tuned “total efficiency” environments.

I haven’t read Ed Yourdon’s book specifically on Death March projects–has anyone here?
Will Sargent about 23 hours later:

I’ve read Death March. I found it wonderful the first time I read it, and then the second time I read it realized that he had taken half of it from his email conversations in the footnotes.

I’m still glad that he explicitly devoted a book to the subject, but I think he could have done far more work on it. Maybe the second edition is better…