High quality death march

A friend sent this link to a great blog “Andres’ thoughts”… right there in the first paragraph it just jumps right off the page … “The team consists of really smart developers, but over time, stress and too little focus on quality have seriously hurt their code base. Today, they are struggling to deliver at all.” www.taylor.se/blog/

I’ve seen this at so many jobs that it starts to feel like the struggle is the only constant. Almost everyone can see the problems, but it’s hard to break the cycle.

For another view of the same problems check out “the Angry Coder”. They break out 5 common problems to look for in small (and not so small) companies. My personal favorite is #3 “Small companies tend to solve problems from the hip … They just dive in, develop something, and modify/rewrite it as required to make it fit various clients’ needs.” www.angrycoder.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=185

Man … I’m so sick of hearing “Oh it’s no big deal, we’ll just make a copy of X and add in a little Y …”. It never works that way! You always end up going the long way around before you realize that your working on a totally different set of problems. I’m all for reusing stuff, but not before you think it through.

Update: The caption on the Quality poster reads “The race for Quality has no finish line – so techinally it’s more of a death march”. Aint that the damned truth! This and other bitter little nuggets can be found at the brilliant www.despair.com