Friday, June 16, 2006

Uncontrollable projects

An interesting post from a Windows team manager on why the Vista release date slipped, despite so many managers putting their reputations / bonuses on the line.

Some of the key reasons:
  • Individual components simple but integration of the components hard (50+ dependency layers)
  • Long approval process for each change (too many cooks in the waterfall kitchen)
  • Windows coders only producing 1,000 lines of code per year (average)
  • Culture of slipping. Nobody wants to hear how long something will actually take to do.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Check Joel's new post.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

Robert Maldon said...

Interesting insight into MS internals then vs now. Thanks for the link!