{"id":1474,"date":"2013-08-29T01:30:25","date_gmt":"2013-08-29T06:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=1474"},"modified":"2013-08-08T07:41:16","modified_gmt":"2013-08-08T12:41:16","slug":"effort-and-the-consequences-of-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2013\/08\/effort-and-the-consequences-of-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"Effort and the Consequences of Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n<p><strong>How much oversight, process, testing, and any activity other than writing software should you do? The answer lies in the consequences of failure. Don&#8217;t let the quest for <em>better<\/em> destroy your software project.<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How much effort should you spend testing software?<\/li>\n<li>How much management oversight should software projects have?<\/li>\n<li>How much effort should go into all activities other than programming?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I have asked myself these questions for years. I am not alone in my puzzlement in this area.<\/p>\n<p>I have had the privilege of working on software projects that ranged from tiny embedded systems to supercomputer signal processing. I have worked in structured, large-process, heavily managed projects and one-man just-code-like-hell projects.<\/p>\n<p>The answer to my questions?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It depends on the consequences of failure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I believe that Microsoft learned a long time ago that if a failure means you hit the Control-Alt-Delete keys and wait two minutes, don&#8217;t put much effort into anything but programming.<\/p>\n<p>I know that if a software failure means you break concrete and dig out an embedded system to reprogram it, you spend a lot of time and effort testing, reading, re-rereading, and more testing of the code before you release it.<\/p>\n<p>This seems pretty simple. Nevertheless, I see people expend large amounts of resources on software where a failure means only a reboot. There is a good enough measure of software. When the software is good enough, stop working on it. Move on to the next great thing.<\/p>\n<p>The quest for <em>better<\/em> often destroys software projects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips How much oversight, process, testing, and any activity other than writing software should you do? The answer lies in the consequences of failure. Don&#8217;t let the quest for better destroy your software project. How much effort should you spend testing software? How much management oversight should software projects have? How much effort [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,23,44],"tags":[132,145,166],"class_list":["post-1474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-management","category-programming","category-risk","tag-management","tag-programming","tag-risk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1474"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1475,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474\/revisions\/1475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}