The Long Haul

Larry Bernstein once counseled me that one of the worst situations is to produce a product that is slightly successful always tottering on the edge of profitability and disdain from users while requiring unappreciated heroic support from maintainers. Maxim Dzoba in his log entry for my Software Architecture and Design class at Stevens, furthers the discussion on how success should be measured. He references a post from a website which should be in your bookmarks/favorites list. It is a thought provoking entry about how and when to measure success. Later!

MAXIM DZOBA'S POST:

Learning from your mistakes.

Many programmers read worsethanfailure.com (formerly thedailywtf.com). It’s a humorous blog which pokes fun at poorly written code, poorly designed applications, and ignorant programmers or management. One time the author posted a big entry that was unlike the usual humorous posts. In it, the author took on an interesting point of view about what it means for a software project to be successful or failed. He states that the common standards for a project to be considered successful are too low. Usually, as soon as a project goes live and money is paid, it is written off as a success and its authors move on to new projects. But, in reality, the product they developed might be, and often is, difficult to use, hard to maintain, doesn’t do its job well, or contains serious design flaws. It may even limp through its lifecycle being a tremendous sink of resources. The project, in fact, may be a complete failure. The author’s main point is that the only way to judge that a project is successful, is to follow it to the end of its lifecycle. But since people consider a project to be a success at its completion, they don’t go back to analyze what mistakes were made, which leads to a more serious problem: they don’t learn from their mistakes!

I was startled to realize that ours is the only industry where a completion of a project is equivalent to being successful. A building that crumbles after a few years or a film that no one would watch are deemed failures and this makes people go back to analyze their mistakes and learn from them. In software, however, it’s likely that people do not understand the mistakes they made and, worst of all, take their bad practices on to their next projects.