Renaissance

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Now is there programmer who can escape from the clutches of the null pointer? I think no. It is like the “Yeldra natu sani” every C programmer is destined to suffer from it. The above error popped up from Windows Media player.

Meanwhile, I wonder what they teach at those so called premier institutes of computer engineering. One of computer science grad names a variable as “anded” because it stores the result of bit wise and of two other variables.

# Tcl snippet
set anded [hexpr $addr & $def(MASK)]
puts $anded

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“You don’t believe in near death experience? then you should work as software developer.”

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“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Douglas Adams, English humorist and science fiction novelist, perhaps
best known for his novel “The Hitch hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

You either get bogged down by the impending deadlines or you learn to enjoy them. Now that I am trying to enjoy the dooming deadline as it approaches me. I don’t know if it will make whooshing sound as it passes me.

As some one said, Schedules are made so that you can miss them. Making a schedule has been a mixed bag for me till now. Spot on if the I am in total control (read individual work) wayward for a group. There is more to programming.

Here I list the schedule made for WinWord at Microsoft for amusement purpose. The chart is adapted from Steve’s Rapid Development book.

Some lessons from WinWord schedule. Aggressive schedule prevented accurate planning. A 60-80 percentage was wishful thinking. The constant part of the schedule was firefighting.

This project experienced extremely high turnover. It had four development leads in 5 years, including two who quit the project because of schedule pressure and one who quit because of medical reason.

Because of schedule pressure, developers shortchanges their feature implementations, declaring them to be done even though they had low quality and in fact were incomplete. The result was that WinWord spent 12 months in Stabilization a period that had been expected to be take only 3 months!

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Making a schedule for the software project is a painful activity. It is amplified more if you do not know what you are doing. Software schedule can be at most an estimation in the early phase of the project. The real schedule details will be available only once the project is underway and things become more clear.

I believe that the developers are one who can contribute to a meaningful schedule, the managers the least. The manager do not have enough information to arrive at the schedule estimate, but most of the time, they tend to push the deadline on the developer. The developers who do not stand up this, tend to agree to the bad schedule and end up screwing their life and work.

There fore developers should vote against a idiotic schedule when they encounter one. They should give or help to make a meaningful schedule. The lead and developers should meet more often to see if they are on track. If not they should take corrective action to get the project schedule on track.

Developers should only consume what take what they can chew, if the deadline is fixed drop the features, if features are fixed then extend the deadline. It is impossible to have maximum features in a very limited time span.

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