FROM
THE EDITOR
Software development is one of the least understood processes in engineering. Because software is pure complexity, most of the metrics and predictability we associate with other types of engineering work behave erratically in the software engineering domain. A shared understanding of the process among a whole project team can be the key to well-set expectations and the perception of a successful project. Our latest feature discusses the issues.
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Kevin
Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal
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Nailing Jell-O to a Wall
Saving Software from the Slippery Slope
It seemed like only a few days from the cold start of the project until the software was live. The manager was blown away. He couldn’t believe that the application was already up and running and doing many of the required functions. He even brought in the engineering director for a quick demo (in order to make some Brownie points for himself, of course). “See, we’ve already got the basic software platform up and running – you can see here what it’s going to look like. Some of the menu items aren’t live yet because this is just a prototype, but the basic functionality is already in place. We’re way ahead of schedule at this point.”
Oddly, the engineering director didn’t seem as impressed as he should have been. Perhaps he couldn’t see how well the software project was going already? Only days into the project and it looked like it was already 80% complete or so. The next six months would be a cake-walk. The team obviously would finish all the required functionality as well as Marketing’s “nice to have” list. The team leader started wondering what extra goodies the engineers would be able to slip in during their spare time.
A month later, things were still looking great. Not quite as great as before, of course. The original UI had to be scrapped because it wasn’t implemented on the right framework. Also, most of the feature implementations had been just stubs initially, and now coding full and robust implementations of them was taking considerably more time. That was all expected, though. With a month to go before functionality freeze and alpha start, the project was well on track. There was really nothing new visible in a demo, so the engineering director was left out of the loop at this juncture. The manager decided to wait until next month to bring him in again – at the alpha milestone. [more]
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