Path: utzoo!telly!lethe!yunexus!davecb
From: davecb@yunexus.YorkU.CA (David Collier-Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Today's Software Standards (was RE:some advice to a sw e
Message-ID: <15444@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Date: 23 Sep 90 16:18:46 GMT
Article-I.D.: yunexus.15444
References: <3259@mindlink.UUCP>
Organization: York U. Computing Services
Lines: 27

Susan Maxwell writes:
| I've seen this sort of politics at work in my industry experience.  An upper
| manager in close contact with the marketplace said "This software will be
| complete at this point in time", regardless of the estimates put forth by the
| engineers.  Quality per se was not sacrificed, but functionality was cut.

	A truism in the development industry is that when the customer says
	"its too big, its too expensive, it doesn't do enough and when is
	the next release", the developers cheer, hug each other and go out
	to celebrate.

| This debilitated the software to the point that it gained few customers, and
| the cost of development was not recovered.  I can't hold the manager
| completely at fault, however. When customers want software that does
| something, they want it *now*.  If you aren't fortunate enough to be
| building that software already, the time crunch is always going to be there.

	Well, I'd say the manager blew it: its actually **hard** to deliver
	such a gutted subset that customers won't accept it. Only a
	substantial misunderstanding of what the customer **needs** could
	lead you to that mistake. 
--dave
-- 
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