Properties5
| Type | Article |
| Author | kqr |
| Date | Jun 15, 2023 |
| URL | https://two-wrongs.com/tindall-on-software-delays.html |
| Note created | Jun 15, 2023 |
Bill Tindall was instrumental to the Apollo missions and considered by many at nasa and mit to be an excellent leader. He authored over a thousand widely circulated memos, called Tindallgrams.
Trust the people doing the work.
See the problem for yourself and accept reality.
Attend to the big picture.
The mindset here is, I believe, critical for consistent software development success: management needs to be on the floor to figure out the facts; and certainly not try to lecture workers on how to do their job. This paragraph is also an admission of the continuity of the problem, in the sense that software can be late by varying degrees, and it’s not an all-or-nothing deal.
When facing a schedule slippage, the first instinct should indeed be to “reduce or simplify” requirements. A 2 % reduction in requirements can easily save 10 % of development time due to avoided innovation and fewer interaction effects.
I like that the personnel and task reassignments are listed last – they’re the least likely to be effective, and run risks of being rather disruptive, but they are still “possible lines of attack”.