[eclipse.org-architecture-council] Software Engineering Classic Mistakes

["Oberhuber, Martin" <Martin.Oberhuber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

 

the following went out on the gsoc-mentors mailing list firday last week,

and I found it worthwile especially in the context of E4:

Steve McConnell has updated the list of classic mistakes in software projects that originally appeared in "Rapid Development". The new list (and some statistics taken from a survey done in 2007) is available at:
      http://www.construx.com/Page.aspx?hid=2537
(It's behind a registration wall, but signing up is free.) 
-- From: Greg Wilson, http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~gvwilson

It looks like that Paper's Copyright requires me redistribute the entire unchanged paper, so I'm attaching it here (284 KB PDF), this should allow me to add some excerpts here in the plaintext. One of the newly added items that struck me was

• Unclear project vision: The lack of a clearly defined and communicated vision undermines the organization's ability to make and execute project-level plans...

Since I thought that the E4 Summit is perhaps the premier chance to sit together and come up with a vision, I thought I'd seed discussions with a Wiki page -- feel free to edit, and have fun discussing it!

 

http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/Vision

 

Some other of the most severe or most frequently occurring mistakes, according to the survey, are:

• Overly optimistic schedules
• Unrealistic expectations
• Wishful thinking
• Inadequate design
• Lack of project sponsorship
• Lack of user involvement

Some food for thought...

 

Cheers,

--

Martin Oberhuber, Senior Member of Technical Staff, Wind River

Target Management Project Lead, DSDP PMC Member

http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm

 

 

Attachment: CxClassicMistakes2008Whitepaper.pdf
Description: CxClassicMistakes2008Whitepaper.pdf