Programmers, Managers, Agile, and Failures: Software’s Long Crisis Slashdot

In this case, the “cheating Frenchman”, who had once called an Uber from his wife’s phone, was exposed when she received notifications of using Uber to visit his mistress. The angry ex-husband is now suing Uber for up to $45 million in damages. This spring a serious software glitch in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter air crafts garnered wide public attention. The plane engineers identified a software bug that causes the planes, when flying in formation, to incorrectly detect targets. As each of the planes within the formation detect a target from varying angles, the software is reportedly unable to decipher whether there is just one or multiple targets. As one news agency put it, the F-35’s are “seeing double”.

Firstly, there’s the direct cost of paying developers and software engineers to sort out the mess. Then there’s downtime, lost data, and squandered transactions. And in the aftermath, there’s the reputational damage to consider. Any organization that suffers a catastrophic software error will lose credibility with customers and the broader market, and might even violate their service agreements. This can result in long-term financial losses as people lose trust in the brand itself and avoid it in the future. Small, fine-grained deliverables that you can track can keep the schedule from getting too far from reality.

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On the other hand, it sounds like a daily kangaroo court, where someone points to a cow-worker, whines, “he is blocking me!”, the target responds, and now you have a nice pissing contest. Standup meetings are nice for the Scrum master because they can play employees off each other and ensure they don’t cooperate with each other, and always have that dagger ready for a bared back. As if we did not already have enough hard to solve problems in the IT sphere… All I’m saying is that 1) Agile doesn’t fix everything, 2) you’re lucky if it fixes anything, and 3) most of the time spent ‘being agile’ is wasted on bullshit ceremonies and circle-jerk sessions. If you take 10 skilled people, you will most likely succeed, no matter what you try.

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Boeing, for example, made great products until the management style was changed to a top-down authoritarian model. That clearly began the fall of Boeing with technical failures one after another.

  • There are managers who believe that management models used successfully in some projects may be applied indefinitely and indiscriminately to others.
  • Then software construction should be performed within those constraints in an agile model to deliver the best value to the customer as quickly as possible.
  • This repeated for several years, before the person was finally laid of due to other reasons.
  • According to the investigation report, the ground control software produced by Lockheed Martin used imperial measurements, while the software onboard, produced by NASA, was programmed with SI metric units.
  • When you get the inevitable interview question have you been on a failed project; why did it fail and what did you do to try to prevent it?

Oh how I wanted to slap that smile off his face. As a developer, if you’re not viewed as an obstacle to the project you’re likely to come out fine from the finger-pointing that will no doubt happen.

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Even worse is when this is done before the requirement analysis. Managers should communicate with the team, informing about the business, objectives, context, next steps, road-maps, partners, etc. Little or nothing must be hidden from the team. Only in the possession of the project metadata, developers can give their best. Everyone should be allowed to give their best.

programmers managers failures software

They copied “Unix” (using the term loosely, though they did get their take Unix-certified) as a foundation, and er, it’s really quite a bodge. But its big selling point is the consistency of interface, where as long as you stay on the marked paths of its garden, “it just works” to a degree seldom seen anywhere else.

current community

Be sure to look on it as a 2-way street – if you can help fill an opening in your company with someone capable, that’s just as good as someone helping you find a job. You can add that as a big fail for whoever managed that project. In fact, we actually just inherited this project around 1-2 months ago from another dev team under the same manager, who has worked on it for a few months. Stack Exchange network consists of 182 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. The ramp-up of a new element requires an extra time of the existing team, delaying the process as a whole. Additionally, that period imposes low relative productivity.

  • Failed projects don’t always result in finger pointing and mudslinging, but it happens often enough that a little common sense self defense never hurts.
  • It’s either because they lack sufficient technical background to understand that something is wrong or because they are terrible at managing and fail to act.
  • In fact, dealing with many time zones can only make things harder.
  • The Standish Group has studied over 40,000 projects in 10 years to reach the findings.
  • Some people aren’t bothered by the current state of affairs on a project.
  • It’s not often you hear of a software bug resulting in divorce, but we are living in exceptional times.

Article was published on: 10/24/22

Author: Viktor Nikolaev

Victor is a professional crypto investor and stockbroker, specializing in such areas as trading on the stock exchange, cryptov currencies, forex, stocks and bonds. In this blog he shares the secrets of trading, current currency indices, crypt currency rates and tells about the best forex brokers. If you have any questions, you can always contact nikolaev@forexaggregator.com

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