Slashdot: Is Project Management Killing Good Products, Teams and Software?

Is Project Management Killing Good Products, Teams and Software?
Published on September 25, 2017 at 04:40PM
New submitter mikeatTB writes: “For software development, no significant developer activity is predictable or repetitive; if it were, the developers would have automated it already,” writes Steven A. Lowe, Principal Consultant Developer at ThoughtWorks, via TechBeacon. “In addition, learning is essentially a nonlinear process; it involves trying things that don’t work in order to discover what does work. You might see linear progress for a while, but you don’t know what you don’t know, so there will be apparent setbacks. It is from these setbacks that one learns the truth about the system — what is really needed to make it work, to make it usable, and to make a difference for the users and the business. In other words, the dirty little secret of software development is that projects don’t really exist. And they’re killing our products, teams, and software.” Lowe continues: “Projects, with respect to software development, are imaginary boxes drawn around scope and time in an attempt to ‘manage’ things. This tendency is understandable, given the long fascination with so-called scientific management (a.k.a. Taylorism, a.k.a. Theory X), but these imaginary boxes do not reduce underlying complexity. On the contrary, they add unnecessary complexity and friction and invite a counterproductive temptation to focus on the box instead of the problem or product. This misplaced emphasis leads to some harmful delusions: Conformance to schedule is the same thing as success; Estimation accuracy is possible and desirable enough to measure and optimize for; The plan is perfect and guarantees success; The cost of forming and dissolving teams is zero; The cost of functional silo hand-offs is zero; The bigger and more comprehensive the plan, the better; Predictability and efficiency are paramount.”